
Class JJ 
Book._ 



Copyright N .. 



CCHRiGlIT DEPOSIT. 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/whiteflameoffranOOwarr 




Sister Julie 

From a painting by j. F. Bouchor, reproduced by permission of 
>J Lyons, France 



Amand Mandelbrod. 



We met the heroine of Gerbevillers, Sister Julie. We sat in her little 
house with its dim old furniture and ancient pictures, and listened to 
her tale of what she had seen and done, and looked at the Cross of the 
Legion of Honor which President Poincare himself pinned on nei habit » 

See page 146 



THE WHITE FLAME 
OF FRANCE 



BY 

MAUDE RADFORD WARREN 

u 

AUTHOR OF 
"PETER PETER," "BARBARA'S MARRIAGES," ETC., ETC. 



ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 




BOSTON 
SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



A 

A 



y&. 



Copyright, 1918 

By SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY 

(incorporated) 



JUL 15 1918 

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A. 

©CI.A499698 



TO 

LORD NORTHCLIFFE 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. A Road in France 3 

II. The Gateway to France .... 13 

III. On to Paris 30 

IV. The City of the Dauntless Heart 45 

V. Waiting for the War Zone ... 62 

VI. The First Stretch of the War 

Zone 82 

VII. The Wide Plantations of the 

Dead 102 

VIII. Nancy, the Invincible 118 

IX. The Black Trail 139 

X. The Fostering Hands 155 

XI. The Good Little Pawn 175 

XII. The Repatriates 194 

XIII. "When the Germans Came" . . 223 

XIV. The Little Autobiographies . . 254 
XV. In the Front-Line Trenches . . 278 

XVI. The Grande Route to Verdun . 297 

XVII. Barnstorming for the Poilus . . 326 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Sister Julie (see page 146) Frontispiece u 

Americans working for France at the headquarters 
of the American Fund for French Wounded at 
the Alcazar 46 / 

The shipping-room of the A. F. F. W. at the Al- 
cazar 56 

Another group at the A. F. F. W 66 

An open-air school for French war-orphans ... 86 

Day nursery, American hostel 156 

In the doorway stood a stout old woman in a very 
clean cap 162 

Building the first house in Sommeilles after the 
Germans evacuated the village 166 

English quaker non-combatants building houses for 
the people of Sommeilles 170 

I have seen thousands of such children whom France 

is rearing for the new nation 254 

A French wounded soldier waiting to be sent down 
from the aid-post 288 

German prisoners taken at Douaumont 300 

Convalescent 330 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 



THE WHITE FLAME 

OF FRANCE 

CHAPTER I 
A Road in France 

A French soldier named this book, a little 
Zouave whom I met on a lonely road in 
the war zone. He made me feel as I never had 
before, the fire and glory in that watchword of 
the French people : " Vive la France! " Some- 
thing had gone wrong with the military car in 
which I had been taken to a certain hospital, very 
near the trenches. The chauffeur accepted this 
difficulty in the uncomplaining way in which the 
French now accept all ills, trivial or tragic. While 
he tinkered, a hunched, patient figure in horizon 
blue, I wandered up and down the roadside. 

Ah, the roads of France, — how poignant is 
the change in them ! What a freight of gay life 
they carried, such a short time since! Four 
years ago most of the inhabitants of France could 
have boasted of the happiness of having no story. 
Now not a man, woman or child but represents 
a drama; scarcely a face but shelters a tragedy. 
It is a bitter thing that a people so simply happy 
as the French, so ready to ripple into joy, into 

3 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

responsiveness, should have to bear not only the 
daily shock, but the long grinding pressure of this 
war. How many of them have lost the very earth 
they once knew, towns, villages, forests, like those 
fabled cities of old that crumbled into the black 
waters about Land's End. Civilians come creep- 
ing back to a heap of ruins that was once a fair 
plain full of homes, and they cannot tell on what 
spot were the houses that were the background 
to their happy living. The priest cannot find the 
site of his church. The farmer looks on a loath- 
some sea of tumbled earth-waves, incapable of full 
tillage for a long time to come, and he asks, 
" Is that the land that once bore my harvests? " 
But the roads of France, — how we tourists 
loved to peer out of the windows to look at them 
as the train swept by! How we loved to unroll 
them under the swift wheels of a motor-car! 
Green-bordered and neat, flashing with charm or 
whimsicality, or serene in suggestions of peace and 
plenty, — oh, never was there anything more sym- 
bolic of the joy of common, simple living than 
those roads of France ! 

And even now, changed as they are, they are 
not sad. Never that! The people of France 
have taken their tragedy as a hero takes his 
wounds, as a saint takes his martyrdom, as a 
mother takes the daily exaction of service she is 
glad to give for love's sake. Seeing their high 
spirit, we who were once tourists of France, and 
are now her eternal lovers, can but walk over the 

4 



A ROAD IN FRANCE 

roads with the same resolution the French people 
show. 

Not sad, then, the roads; but no longer sym- 
bolic of a gay, peace-loving people. As I wan- 
dered along that Aisne road, looking at some 
abandoned trenches, now already green again and 
harmless as ditches, I tried to forget the war or 
at least to believe that some day all the wounds of 
France will be healed, like those raw gashes of 
earth where, such a short time since, good men 
died and " climbed quickly to God." 

But the road would not let me forget the war. 
Along it came, first of all some wagons bearing 
materials for repairing the trenches, — stakes and 
trench-mats, and logs. Then came two or three 
" kitchens," their square tops shining, smoke com- 
ing from their stove-pipes. They look competent 
and fussy, reminding one somehow of a capable, 
energetic housewife who cannot give service with- 
out a strong flavor of egotism. After an interval 
came a group of civilians in black. They looked 
curiously at the stranger, bowing, gravely smiling. 
There is not much laughter now in France. 

More wagons, this time loaded with ammuni- 
tion. Following came a big gun, drawn by eight 
mules, and covered with cunning splashes of 
brown and green camouflage. The driver was 
looking upward, and I followed his gaze to see, 
high in the air, a German Taube. Sinister, omi- 
nous, it soared and spied, a dreadful bird. And 
then swinging up the road with crisp, marching 

5 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

feet came two companies of men in horizon-blue. 
I forgot the menace of the Taube, for they were 
marching up to the first-line trenches. 

Who of us has not at some time stood in a 
crowded railway station, or on some great street 
through which pours the epic of a nation, and been 
struck with certain wonder that all these people 
should be nothing to him, nor he to them, that 
these people know sorrow and love, suffering and 
remorse and peace and hope, like himself, but 
they are eternally strangers to him, are already 
flowing away from him forever. 

But whosoever has such a feeling to-day, as he 
sees a company of soldiers march by, touches not 
sentiment but tragedy, touches, too, the sublimity 
of courage and self-sacrifice. We smile at the 
soldier; we say " au 'voir" but in our hearts we 
say good-bye, and we know that if he comes back 
it will be as a gift. Of those men in horizon-blue, 
some were walking their last along this fair road. 
Boys, who had never yet made a real choice, a 
real decision, never known the shy, wondering 
happiness of a girl's love, were looking their last 
on the green and gold of the world, their lives 
never to be fully unrolled on this side of that last 
outpost beyond which no sentry can stay any of us. 

Those men in horizon-blue contrasted sharply 
with the men in khaki whom I had seen in Eng- 
land a short time before, Colonials, as it hap- 
pened, tall, broad, pink-cheeked, their clothes of 
good cloth, well cut; they had looked as if on 

6 



A ROAD IN FRANCE 

parade. The uniforms of the French soldiers 
were made of shoddy cloth, badly cut, badly sewn, 
quick to stain and fade and soak in moisture. 
Their faces were sallow, unshaven; in repose they 
were even haunted, old. Men who are twenty- 
eight look forty, and men who are forty seem sixty. 
They bear an invisible burden, such as the Eng- 
lish and we Americans need not bear. Men in 
khaki know that no matter what happens to them, 
their land is safe; but the Frenchmen know that 
France is deeply wounded, for generations to 
come. 

On they marched, smiling and waving as I called 
" Bon chance! " to them, calling back to me, 
" Merely Madame" and " Vive I'Amerique! " 
The horizon-blue of their uniforms spread over 
the road, splendid waves which the enemy would 
breast in vain. Before the war, certain countries 
suggested colors to me: green for Ireland, and 
golden for Italy ; crude red for Turkey, and royal 
purple for Palestine. If I had thought of France 
in such terms, it would have been as opalescent, 
a color shimmering and variable. But now, for- 
ever, it will be horizon-blue, noble, beautiful, the 
symbol for deathless courage, for endurance, for 
patience, for dignity, for a stern, high spirituality. 

They had gone ; the road was still and lonely, 
for the sounds of the cheering had died down, 
and I was seeing only the brave, strained faces 
from which all the youth had been seared away. 
Presently, behind me, I heard a sound of whistling, 

7 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

gay, boyish. It was a strain of " Marlbrough s'en 
va-t-en guerre." I turned. There swinging down 
a path was a little Zouave soldier. His crimson 
cap and red-embroidered coat made a vivid note 
against the green background, contrasted almost 
violently with the horizon-blue of which my mind 
and soul were full. On he came, happy, sponta- 
neous, making me think of a scarlet tanager, of 
a cardinal bird, of a figure in a Christmas panto- 
mime, of many gay and happy things, none of 
them associated with war. He felt my welcome 
and my invitation, for he sat down on the bank 
with me and we became friends. 

People in the war zone very quickly make short 
cuts to friendship in these swift days. They shear 
away conventions, put aside reticences, climb over 
the barriers that the world erects for social pro- 
tection. In this world of war, the soul may walk 
uncovered, for only what is real counts now. So 
this little Zouave soldier and I talked freely. 

" You are happy? " I said. 

"Oh, but yes," he returned; "I am on my 
permission. The cottage where my mother lives 
is across the fields, half a mile. But she did not 
expect me, no; she is gone to my aunt's for the 
day. So I am going after her. First she will 
weep with joy to see me; then she will laugh; then 
she will weep again because of losing an hour or 
two of my permission" 

" Oh, but don't stay here, then," I said, " much 
as I want to talk to you — " 

8 



A ROAD IN FRANCE 

He unslung a loaf of bread from his pack. 

" Oh, but I must eat," he said, with that rever- 
ence for the digestive processes which all France 
shows; " but yes, my mother will understand that. 
So, if madame permits, I will eat." 

Madame permitted, and asked, 

" Then this is your home ? You were born 
here?" 

He found his bottle of wine, before he replied, 
with a sly laugh, 

"Ah, no; my mother happened to be visiting 
here when the Germans made war. Madame 
would never guess where I was born. In that 
part of Alsace which the Germans hold ! But yes ! 
And I was mobilized in the German army. Ah, 
yes, I and many other young men, loyal to France. 

" See, then, madame, we were born of parents 
who had once known French citizenship. We 
spoke the language in our homes. And on the 
streets, when we played our games, we spoke 
French; if a gendarme came up, we spoke Ger- 
man. We used to talk of what we would do if a 
war broke out. For we knew that Germany was 
only waiting to eat up more of our France. 

" Well, then, madame, we were mobilized. I 
was just seventeen, no more. Men of forty-five 
were taken, too. The Germans wanted to spend 
all the blood of the Alsatians, first, and save their 
own men. That is like them. They do not think 
we are citizens; we are conquered subjects. But 
no one protested. It would have done no good, 

9 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

and, besides, we knew what we were going to do, 
we Alsatians ! So they took us, and put us in the 
German lines, and we waited our opportunity. 
The shells came over and killed some of us — 
French shells. Then one night our chance came. 

" Eighty of us, that night, crawled on our hands 
and knees through the German lines. Do you 
realize what that means, madame, — the first dis- 
covery, and all of us would have been dead men ! 
What if a pistol dropped! What if even a heel 
clicked sharply on a pebble! Such straining 
muscles, such an anguish of listening, such fear 
lest we cough or sneeze ! We took the German 
patrol prisoners. Me, I was glad not to kill 
them; they were men we had eaten with. We tied 
up their mouths and took away their weapons 
and made them crawl before us. 

" It was I, madame, — I, who had the honor 
of hailing the French patrol, of telling them who 
we were, of fixing their faith in us. It was I, little 
Jean-Baptiste, who stood at the head of the eighty 
in headquarters and answered the questions of 
the officers. It was I who could tell them exactly 
how many kilometres from the front line lay the 
storehouse of ammunition, for I had gauged that. 
They took us to Paris; you will understand, mad- 
ame, that they had to be careful, for some 
Alsatians are not loyal to France. Spies are 
everywhere. 

" But if madame were to look up my record 
now she would not find me registered in the army 

10 



A ROAD IN FRANCE 

as Jean Baptiste thus-and-so from German Alsace. 
Ah, no ; for if that were so, and I were ever taken 
prisoner by the Germans, I should be shot as a 
traitor. For, do you see, madame, we are changed 
from sector to sector. Some day some of us may 
be holding the trenches in French Alsace, and 
may be taken prisoner in a raid. The French 
government gave me a new surname, and regis- 
tered me as from Paris. That has been done for 
all of the eighty. Me, as you see, they put in a 
Zouave regiment. When our Alsace all belongs 
to us again, we shall take back our own names. 
I shall lead my mother to our little house, and I 
shall say, 

" ' Here, Mama, here is your French home 
that your Jean-Baptiste gave his blood for.' " 

" May the day come soon," I said. " Do you 
know, Jean-Baptiste, as you came along the path, 
I had just been looking at the men in blue, and 
you seemed like a bit of living fire." 

Jean-Baptiste sprang to his feet. 

" I am fire," he cried, " I, and others like me. 
I am the fire of France ! So are the men in blue; 
there are blue flames, madame, and yellow. The 
men from Morocco and Tunis, they are yellow 
fire. And we are all burning for France, madame ! 
Vive la France! Anyone who loves her is for 
her a tongue of flame. Vive, vive la France! " 

I had heard that slogan before, thrilled to it, 
but never as now. That little ugly soldier in 
red, with his unshaven face alight, his dark eyes 

ii 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

gleaming, was for me a torch, was France. The 
colors, blue, red, yellow, fused for me into the 
white flame of France. 

And I knew that she would live ! — that behind 
that prayer, that vow, lies a blazing spirit of pure 
devotion. That little soldier's pulsing cry, " Vive 
la France!" gave me courage, taught me that for 
all that France is martyred, for all that her veins 
are bleeding, she can never be a forlorn country. 
Never, because in every true heart in France, in 
every home, simple or stately, there burns a white 
flame dedicated to France. The country is one 
great altar dedicated to patriotism. The fire will 
burn forever, because it is the spirit of France. 
France shall live, indeed! 



12 



CHAPTER II 

The Gateway to France 

MY little Zouave friend, Jean-Baptiste, was the 
first and only person in France to ask me 
why I had come. 

I said, truly enough, " To see, and to write, 
and, where I can, to help." 

Yet, saying that, I knew a sense of shame, a 
feeling that I had no right to be in France, unless 
I could be sure of bringing to France many, many 
times what I should cost her in food and trans- 
portation. To his question as to how I had come 
I could have replied, 

" I got on a ship in New York, and landed in 
England, and then I went to Havre, and to Paris, 
and after that to the war zone." 

But that would not have explained at all. If at 
that point Jean-Baptiste had not finished his bread 
and wine, and if I had not remembered his wait- 
ing mother, perhaps we should have talked, and I 
should have told him of the home in the Marne 
country that kept calling me from the moment 
war was declared. But Jean-Baptiste's meal was 
over, and the patient chauffeur crawled resignedly 
from under the gray military motor to say that 
at last madame could proceed. 

So we left Jean-Baptiste, a scarlet flame, swing- 
13 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

ing down the road to the woman who loved him, 
and who would receive him as one born again. 
And as we drove farther and farther away from 
the sound of bombardment, I thought of that 
home in the Marne region that had taken me back 
to France, just as definitely as did the good ship 
Finland. 

I had no strong emotional association with that 
home, — a cool stone farmhouse, standing on a 
hillside. I liked the Marne country, because it 
supplied the ideal combination of beautiful land- 
scape with prosperous homes. Village after vil- 
lage with big churches and little houses, quaint 
courtyards, stone fountains, and cheerful, inter- 
ested people whose friendly smiles made of one 
an honored guest. Before the door of this farm- 
house were two green poplars that made me think 
of green fire, so rich they were in beauty and 
force and fervor. But mainly I was pleased be- 
cause the house contained so many happy people : 
madame, the practical and confident; her husband, 
the least degree henpecked; four big sons, very 
obedient to their competent mother; one little 
son, conspiring for disobedience with his indul- 
gent father; one big daughter, so beautiful it 
caught one's breath, and as docile and sweet as 
she was beautiful; one little daughter, piquant and 
fiery and spoiled. Rosy-cheeked, healthy people 
they were, who shrieked a protest when I opened 
my windows of a cold night, and who considered 
more than one bath a week an affectation. I have 

14 



THE GATEWAY TO FRANCE 

sat with them in their dining-room, which gave a 
good view of the sloping fields in which they all 
worked, and have listened to madame gaily boast- 
ing of the dowries she would be able to give her 
daughters and of the fine matches she contem- 
plated for her sons. Each year her ambitions 
grew, and various girls, once considered very de- 
sirable, were mentally rejected as not good enough. 
I have seen that family in their friendly inter- 
course with their neighbors. I have heard them 
at their prayers, when the beads of their rosaries 
slipped through their fingers, soft as whispers, and 
their murmuring voices mingled with the winds 
outside my windows. 

I wanted to know that they were safe, because 
they stood to me as a sort of symbol of the simple, 
common living of all France; because, if they were 
safe, I could believe that some day peace and con- 
tent would come back to France. When the Ger- 
mans began to roll over France in a gray, noisome 
flood of force and theft, burning and rapine, I 
could see it, because I knew the look of the land 
as one knows a beloved face and because I could 
see the Lecontier family, running away, as if they 
were the thieves, or else standing to face who 
knows what. And the picture seemed unbeliev- 
able; no written account, however vivid, could 
make me really certain that the most brutal war 
of all the ages had come, that we, safe on our side 
of the Atlantic, were not merely stifling in a dread 
nightmare. 

is 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

Once aboard the Finland, the civilian atmos- 
phere of America quite disappeared and we had 
entered the first stretch of the vista that led to 
war. There was another writer, with England as 
his objective, not France. There were two young 
men, going over to drive ambulances. There was 
a Belgian officer, crossing by way of England to 
his company. There were Englishmen returning 
home to enlist; others back from missions and 
errands of sorts, all intending to help in the cause 
of the Allies. There were the mothers and wives 
and daughters of Canadian officers, eager to keep 
as close as they could to the men they loved. 

From the first, this sea voyage was like no 
other any of us had ever taken. We had broken 
off abruptly from America, where scarcely any- 
one actually realized the war, and, journeying 
between sea and sky, our minds were being swept 
bare, as it were, ready for the impressions of life 
determined by war, and war only. It was chiefly 
of the war that we talked. As the days passed 
there were a few of us who spoke of our con- 
cerns in America as if they did not belong to us 
any more; some day they might be reassumed 
after strange adventuring. Meantime, since lives 
cannot be suspended, we built up a background 
of shipboard living. The passengers showed 
each other their particular types of life-saving 
waist-coats, capable of being puffed out with 
buoying air, and with neat pockets for flasks of 
brandy. 

16 



THE GATEWAY TO FRANCE 

In the staterooms our life-belts were placed 
where we could easily get them, and stewards 
hovered about to show us how to put them on, and 
to relate to us stories of how they had seen this 
or that Norwegian or Dutch vessel submarined 
off the coast of Ireland. On deck every day there 
was fire-drill and boat-drill among the crew, and 
whoever feared the menace of floating mines 
might have feared the frailty of some of those 
sailors, — sallow and dissipated and consumptive 
most of them looked. Doubtless, the best of 
their kind had already enlisted. I was sure we 
should not meet misadventure; nevertheless, I was 
glad that the lifeboat to which I had been assigned 
was to be manned by the strongest and soberest 
looking of the sailors. I selected, as my bit of 
precious human salvage, a little girl who weighed 
about the same as my elder godson Martin. If 
I could lift Martin in and out of a bathtub, and 
carry him on my back up and down stairs, I was 
sure I could climb down a long slippery ladder into 
a lifeboat with that blue-eyed Canadian child 
about my neck. 

And all the time, as we ploughed our blue way 
towards England, it was not that land I was see- 
ing, but France, opalescent and lovely, the Marne 
valley with its red-roofed villages, huddling cosily 
at the feet of the hills, and its long strips of slop- 
ing fields, — France, the Marne valley, and the 
little home of the Lecontiers, perhaps safe, with 
madame waiting at the doorway to welcome me, 

i7 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

pretending to remember me, whether she did or 
not; and perhaps not safe, only a wreck of stones 
and splintered trees. It was that which I saw, 
rather than the little Canadian children racing up 
and down the decks, or the Belgian officer, conduct- 
ing a concentrated flirtation with the prettiest 
woman on board, or the inscrutable grass widow, 
pretending to be interested in the English lawyer 
who was so slow and dull, so dreadfully the-year- 
before-last in all his processes, that we marvelled 
at the lady's fortitude. 

When we got into the mine and submarine zone 
a certain increased tensity of feeling was obvious. 
People laughed a little more than usual, or talked 
a degree more jerkily, or flitted restlessly from 
topic to topic. The lifeboats were swung out 
over the sides of the ship, and we took to staring 
at them as if we had never seen them before. 
The ship was more than ever brightly illuminated, 
especially the incandescent flag picked out on both 
sides, for this was in the days before we were in 
the war, before the most ruthless submarining had 
begun, and when American passenger ships 
courted publicity, advertised their nationality. 
Nervous passengers wore their life-belts all night, 
and the mother of my little Canadian protege de- 
cided that, in case of a submarine, she would 
prefer to have a man save her child rather than 
me. The officers became more indefinite in their 
replies to questions, and the stewards had an un- 
comfortable way of offering assurance of safety 

18 



THE GATEWAY TO FRANCE 

as if they did not wholly believe what they said, 
but did wholly relish the situation. 

Two melting summer nights, star-sown; two 
mellow days, with passengers dressed in unduly 
warm clothes, gazing over the sea in search of 
periscopes and those barrel-marked, death-dealing 
mines. Then the first land, changing from gray 
to pink. It made us forget possible danger, re- 
minded us that our eyes were sea weary. We 
gazed at it hungrily, feasting on lighthouses and 
farms, until presently it all grew familiar, and 
we went below to finish our final packing. Green 
slopes and towns; the harbor outside of Liver- 
pool, the slow entrance, when we passed a battle- 
ship, destroyer and merchant vessels, painted 
black. Then the dock, where we saw our first 
men in khaki, and some men in bright blue, who 
were convalescent soldiers. How quietly they 
stood on the dock, and yet what dread action they 
had seen! What sights and feelings they knew 
that they could never tell us, and never make us 
understand if they did tell us. A strange dock, 
this, changed from its civilian coloring by the 
uniforms. 

Below, then, to be quizzed by the alien-inspec- 
tors. Two long tables, and officers with weapons 
and stern faces. I was well supplied with letters, 
and, though an American citizen, I was British 
born, and still I had a guilty feeling as if maybe 
I had come over to embarrass England and 
France. Echoes floated out to us of stiff exami- 

19 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

nations and the inscrutable grass widow forgot 
her reticence and expressed herself in no uncertain 
terms about the absurdity of such grilling. The 
English faces remained unmoved, — but I should 
have liked to warn her! 

My turn; my passport scrutinized, my "to 
whom it may concern " letters read. Then ques- 
tion upon question, in which it was easy to read 
the fact that spies had been taken in England who 
had apparently come over to write articles in 
favor of the Allies. How long did I wish to stay? 
And why had I come? And what was I going to 
write? I told them my father had been a Cana- 
dian officer, and that 1 had Irish cousins leading 
companies at Gallipoli and on the Somme. That 
caused a little softening. More softening when 
I showed some letters from my Irish relatives, 
bemoaning the Sinn Fein rebellion, and most of 
all when, by chance, there slipped from a flap of 
my hand-bag a crumpled bit of paper. It was a 
statement to the effect that the Saturday Evening 
Post was enclosing a substantial check for a story 
entitled, " You Can Always Bluff 'Em." The 
size of that check should have convinced them that 
some editors thought I was fit to write alone. 
But no ; it was the chance the title gave the chief 
officer to make a joke. 

" If you 're not all right," he said, " you can't 
bluff us. Haw, haw, haw! " 

" Ha ! ha ! ha ! " said I gaily, for I knew that 
joke had passed me. 

20 



THE GATEWAY TO FRANCE 

I am afraid that officer thought, by my appre- 
ciation of his words, that he had made a great 
impression upon me. And indeed he had! He 
was so much funnier than he dreamed ! 

Passed I was, and with the conviction that when 
we Americans got into the war we should do well 
to take example by the British thoroughness in 
guarding against spies. The other correspondent 
joined me, his dark eyes smiling; he had been 
thoroughly grilled, he said, but he had told them 
he did n't expect, through his writings, to put a 
dent in the British empire. We said good-bye, 
then, to the Finland, and wished good luck to the 
officers and stewards. Ashore, next, before the 
customs officers. My man was Irish. 

" You Ve no cigars or cigarettes ma'am, of 
course? " he said. 

" Just a few for the soldiers," I murmured. 

He looked at me stonily, and then winked. 

" I did n't hear what you said, ma'am. You 
have no cigars or cigarettes? " 

" There might be a broken handful," I replied. 

" Nothing dutiable," he said, smearing grimy 
white chalk on the cleanest portion of my trunk, 
" but the next time you cross, ma'am, let some- 
one else do your packing, if you have n't the con- 
science to stretch the truth, like, for the sake of 
the soldier boys smoking this London trash they 
sell you." 

The hotel then, and dinner, the late comers 
from the ship reporting that the grass widow had 

21 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

not been allowed to land, and would have to go 
back, three days hence, on the Finland, to Amer- 
ica. We expressed our opinion of the English 
lawyer who had not tried to help her. Then a 
group of us set out for the police station to show 
our passports and register. We felt our way 
along pitch-black streets, moving slowly among 
groups of soldiers and civilians. So often a sol- 
dier walked with a girl, their arms entwined; they 
were snatching their happiness under the ribs of 
death, and what puritan would have been harsh 
enough to wish they had had more regard for con- 
vention? At the police station the inspector 
roundly scolded us because we had not come 
sooner. 

That night I dreamed not of England and of the 
dusky gold of the men in khaki, but of the valley 
of the Marne, and of soldiers in horizon-blue, 
marching past the farmhouse where the Lecon- 
tiers lived, — if, indeed, they still lived ! And 
all next morning, when we journeyed down to 
London, I kept seeing not the walls of Chester, 
or green English fields, or little rows of factory 
houses, or rich rear gardens of little village 
homes; but I saw France. England was brave, 
superb, — but France was calling me. 

No land has a monopoly of bravery. The Ger- 
mans are brave, who go out with their officers 
sheltering behind them, and die for love of their 
fatherland — fed on lies and hatred. No country 
can be braver than England. Her sailors sweep 

22 



THE GATEWAY TO FRANCE 

the seas ; her women and old men do the bulk of 
the civilian labor; and the men in khaki " carry- 
on " at the front; so many of them sedentary men 
who used to be in offices and behind counters, 
whose greatest and only adventure in life was to 
make ends meet from week to week; whose chief 
triumph was to beat the next-door neighbor at 
flower raising. The men who work and live and 
die together at the front, gentles and simples, 
prove to us of what great stuff poor little man is 
made. 

Day by day, as I waited to get to France, I saw 
how magnificently England bore the war. Twice 
while I was there I saw it come close in the shape 
of Zeppelin raids, and I heard no word of fear. 
The first time I saw a Zeppelin pass over London 
I think I discovered a spy. I was in Bloomsbury, 
staying in a little pension where I have gone ever 
since I was a school girl. As usual, we had known 
for hours beforehand that there was to be a raid, 
and, at midnight, we were in the square, watching. 
English people are advised, during a raid, either 
to go into their cellars, or else to stand on the first 
floor between the angles of two walls. Possibly 
there may be some who take the advice. My 
own observation has been that they like to see the 
show from the streets. 

My landlady was standing beside me, and we 
were watching the searchlights. Across from us 
was a vacant lot, and behind this the backs of a 
row of houses which fronted on a certain famous 

23 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

square. Suddenly I found myself not looking at 
the sky, but at a certain window on the fourth 
floor of the row. There was a dim light in the 
room behind it. Every other window was dark, 
as this one should have been. 

" That blind over there is not drawn," I said 
to the landlady. " Somehow, it makes me feel 
uneasy. Let us watch it." 

We did, missing part of the flight of the Zeppe- 
lin. But we were rewarded. From the open 
window came a broad sweep of powerful light. 
It was as wide as a plank; it stretched forth fully 
forty feet; and for quite fifteen seconds it re- 
mained there. Wondering and indignant as I 
was, I could not but admire that German sig- 
naller for braving his own death; if the Zeppelin 
watchers saw his message, telling them that they 
were above London and ought now to drop bombs, 
and if they obeyed, he in his fourth-story eerie 
might be blown to nothingness. 

But that is not what happened to him. The 
next morning I got the number of the house, and, 
tucking my landlady under my arm, I sought the 
nearest police station. I was already known to 
the desk inspectors as one of the meek aliens who 
had applied for an identification book. But on 
this morning I did not humbly wait their pleasure. 
I demanded to see the head inspector, and would 
not have anyone else fubbed off upon me. 

I knew that if the head inspector had had a 
shilling for every spy story he had heard, he 

24 



THE GATEWAY TO FRANCE 

would be reasonably well-to-do. So I set out to 
impress him. I began by assuming a " my good 
man " manner, which would be sure to count. 
Then, after telling my story, I said, 

" Now, I know what I saw. But if I am 
wrong, I am quite willing to make myself ridicu- 
lous, just on the chance of trapping a spy. If the 
people in that house are honest they won't mind 
being searched any more than I mind being ridicu- 
lous. Moreover, I am not coming back to- 
morrow to ask you how it all turned out." 

The chief inspector was impressed. He strug- 
gled visibly, however, and said, 

" Of course, madame, you, being an American, 
don't understand about our fogs. It might just 
have been the street lamp shining out under the 
fog that you saw." 

This was " a bit thick." I even felt my docile 
landlady bristling. So I said, 

" My good man, do you think, after what I 've 
said, that you need offer me an explanation like 
that?" 

He laughed in an embarrassed way, and said, 

" No, madame, I do not." 

We walked out, triumphantly, and my landlady 
saw to it that I had the largest portion of dessert 
for dinner. Ten minutes after we had left the 
police station we saw a group of policemen enter- 
ing the suspected house. The next day that 
fourth-floor room was vacant We knew it, be- 
cause the milk bottle disappeared off the sill, the 

25 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

window was not again opened, and the blind was 
kept down. 

A few days before I went to France I saw an- 
other Zeppelin raid, saw it rather fully, with no 
distraction by spies. Already I had seen the Zep- 
pelin that had soared so insolently over the sea 
and the marshes, expecting to feel its way to Lon- 
don, and guided by the gleam of the Thames, and 
perhaps by German signallers, to drop bombs on 
Woolwich Arsenal. It had come to grief in 
Essex, and had sunk into a meadow. The officers 
and crew had set it afire, but only the envelope 
had burned. It looked like the silver skeleton 
of some prehistoric monster, as it lay, the length 
of a city block, dwarfing the little farmhouse be- 
fore which it had settled. Very harmless it ap- 
peared, with British architects and engineers 
working upon it, and mastering all its secrets; 
quite bereft of any predatory significance. 

I was thinking of it the day of the great raid. 
My business in England was done, and I was 
free to go to France, free to realize the war at 
last. I had been spending the day in Essex, and 
as I went Londonwards in the twilight, all over 
the train there was a warm whisper. The Zeppe- 
lins were coming! The train moved slowly. 
People saw to it that the blinds were rigidly drawn 
down. In the station, as I walked towards the 
exit, two or three strangers stopped me and told 
me of the coming invasion. No cab was in sight, 
so I took a tram to Tottenham Court Road. I 

26 



THE GATEWAY TO FRANCE 

was the only passenger, and the conductor passed 
the time by telling me how, three months before, 
one of these very trams, as like to the one I was 
on as one pea is to another, was struck by a bomb 
from a Zeppelin, and those who were not immedi- 
ately killed died hours after in frightful agony ! 

When I reached my pension there was a great 
crowd in the square, waiting for the Zeppelin, 
unafraid, sure of the power of British anti-aircraft 
guns. The little English maid who brought me 
my tea every morning took her station behind 
me. I could hear her grating her teeth with rage. 

" Drat them Huns," she muttered. 

" Please call them Germans, Elsie," I begged. 
" Of course we want them to die. But they are 
doing what they think is right. For your own 
sake, not theirs, don't call them Huns. You don't 
want to go mad with hatred and bitterness, as 
the Germans have." 

Elsie sniffed. Silently, intently, we all watched 
the sky. Slim searchlights swept over it, like long, 
feeling fingers, — a dozen of them. Suddenly 
into the blue star-strewn arch sprang an irregu- 
lar, wraith-like oval of light. It swung over the 
sky, swifter than any bird, thin as a summer 
cloud, a keen spy of the air. It paused in its soar- 
ing, and, revealed by it, a Zeppelin, beautifully 
defined, looking like a silver shuttle, drifted 
across the sky. We held our breath. Suddenly 
the Zeppelin darted and swerved, as if it knew 
it was trapped. Frantically it sought to escape 

27 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

the searchlight, while the spectators cheered and 
clapped as we do at a Fourth of July celebration. 

Then an explosive bullet must have hit the 
envelope, for the silver changed to yellow-red, 
and then to crimson. Now the Zeppelin looked 
like a huge cigar. Slowly it turned, nose down, 
still holding its shape. Then great tongues of 
flame shot out from it, and it fell for swift, fiery 
miles. I thought of those strong lines in Paradise 
Lost, depicting the long fall of Satan, and I 
wished that Milton's eye could have seen this 
sight, and clothed it in immortal verse. 

My eyes fastened absently on Elsie's exultant 
face. Mindful of tips, she subdued her expres- 
sion, but still she had the look of the cat who 
swallowed the canary, as she said to me, piously, 

" God knows I don't wish them poor Germans 
any 'arm, ma'am, but I am very glad they are all 
burned to a crisp ! " 

Much later, when the streets and the sky were 
empty, an English sentinel airship swept aloft 
suddenly, but as if softly; two great searchlights 
soared with it, enveloped it, and then made a 
splendid silver cross, in the midst of which it 
rested, rounded, golden, beautiful. I could have 
fancied it the Holy Grail. It was a beneficent, a 
purifying, sight. And again I thought of that 
little home in the Marne, and hoped that all was 
well with it. If not that, then I hoped, passion- 
ately, that after this war every nation might re- 
build for the better. 

28 



THE GATEWAY TO FRANCE 

Death in what I had seen that night, but beauty 
too. This war that has befallen the world seems 
chaotic waste, but already people have begun to 
rebuild. What if all that has happened is just 
the vast complexity of fate at which it is useless 
to marvel, upon which the world must rise to 
another and nobler fate? What if the" bravery 
and self-sacrifice and loss, the stupidity and 
cruelty, will pave the way to a new order of liv- 
ing? The war has shown the amazing courage of 
the world, the amazing uselessness of ideals and 
people in which we believed, the equally amazing 
efficiency of those who seemed of little worth. 
What if, beneath the complexity which muddled 
us before the war, there was a deeper simplicity, 
— only we had not reached it ! What if there are 
deeps of the human spirit to which our codes and 
creeds and philosophies have not yet carried us? 
It would seem as if men had gone down into the 
very abyss of hell and yet had found God there. 
Old hopes are ruined, but a new and sounder faith 
will come, — the new sun rise, bringing the new 
day. 



29 



CHAPTER III 
On to Paris 

England was brave, was wonderful, but 
France was my objective. There came a 
day when, all formalities over, I prepared to 
cross the Channel. Most mysteriously I was told 
that I could not cross the day I meant to. I might 
come back every day to ask. Other travellers 
went to Southampton on the chance that the offi- 
cers did not know what they were talking about. 
Three days later I met them in Southampton, half 
sheepish, half impatient. Meanwhile I preferred 
London. 

The day I set out I had occasion to go, by under- 
ground, to Charing Cross Station. The under- 
ground train was full of soldiers, returning to 
the front. Their eyes, — I have seen nothing so 
moving in all this war as the eyes of the English 
soldiers going back to the front. Their faces are 
steady, rather blank; the eyes are glazed, remote, 
opaque, as if to hide the horror of war from those 
who have not directly experienced it; or else re- 
signed, sad, like the eyes of old, old people who 
have long since passed beyond wonder and ques- 
tioning. Lads of twenty with the eyes of ancient 
men, an inferno of searing history behind them 
and to come ; they are the same age as our sopho- 

30 



ON TO PARIS 

more boys, but matured by abnormal experience, 
carefree youth dead forever. They have seen 
what they can never tell us, what they would not 
tell us if they could. Their experience has given 
them a dreadful solitariness, has shut a part of 
their souls away even from those they love most. 
They have a silent communion of spirit with each 
other — perhaps with the enemy; but to us their 
eyes say that they have known a terrible loneli. 
ness and strangeness, a terrible wonder over the 
meaning of slaughter and pain and grief. Life 
has suddenly become concentrated, abnormal. A 
simple man gains his philosophy slowly through 
the years ; then what has he now, to withstand this 
black Gargantuan horror that has reversed his 
quiet English life? Nothing but endurance. His 
eyes become inscrutable, — and he waits. 

Many wore on their sleeves the shining stripes 
which symbolize wounds taken for England. 
Heavy equipment lay across their knees or at their 
feet, and beside each was some woman dear to 
him. The faces of the women were determinedly 
cheerful or smiling, never turned quite directly 
towards the men. The faces of the soldiers, — 
I felt that even by an involuntary glance I had 
intruded, had seen too deeply into the secret, 
brave, splendid souls of men going back to France, 
perhaps to die, knowing all the dreadful forms in 
which death could come, the hurling earthquake 
agonies, instant or long drawn out, by which a 
man may be cast through the Black Gates that are 
the last known outposts of the world of war. 

31 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

Many of them will come home nerve broken, 
and lay their sick heads for comfort on some 
woman's breast; many more will lie at man's 
lowest and yet highest level, head deep in Earth, 
all pain and strangeness, all hate and mercy and 
forgiveness done with forever. They will be 
well at rest in the noble plantations of the dead. 

Only once did the calculated cheerfulness of 
any of the women break down. A sergeant with 
two gold stripes across his sleeve held his little 
flaxen-haired girl on his arm, looking at her in- 
tently, as if he wanted to take her innocent smiles 
and words away with him for sanctuary in the 
monstrous days to come. A soldier friend oppo- 
site leaned forward and said, 

" Give me the kiddie, Jim. She leans across 
your old bone as if it was a five-barred gate, and 
it 's none too strong yet." 

The father shook his head and smiled. 

" Thank God for the ache she gives my arm," 
he said. 

His wife bit her lip, and heavy tears dropped 
on her cheeks. The women near enough to have 
heard looked out of the windows into the dark- 
ness rushing by. The sergeant had struck the 
chord of Home ; we knew what it cost him to leave 
all he was leaving, and what it cost his wife to 
let him go; and we all knew he represented hun- 
dreds of thousands of men in all the warring 
countries. 

The train stopped; the soldiers lifted their 
32 



ON TO PARIS 

equipment, the desultory talk ceased, and we filed 
silently up the stairs and into the sunshiny court 
of Charing Cross Station. A convoy of wounded 
soldiers had just arrived, and the ambulances were 
taking them away. We could see the inert figures 
laid in tiers and covered with dark blankets, 
nurses in attendance. The spectators, obedient 
to the order for quiet, merely waved or cried soft 
" bravos "; and as the ambulances moved out of 
the courtyard, the flower sellers at the gates flung 
handfuls of roses and violets across the feet of 
the wounded men. 

In the station I fixed my eyes on constables and 
porters and canteen workers, but no such evasion 
could make this scene one of ordinary departure, 
or could shut away the pervasive atmosphere of 
patriotism and love and grief. Against the will 
seeped into consciousness the solemn pathos of 
farewells restrained, broken, passionate; all brave 
and all sacrosanct because made under the shadow 
of death. None of these men and women forgot 
that one of the wings of death is called victory; 
no man would have stayed and no woman would 
have held him, but as they parted, they gave 
each other up. 

There was a rush of feet, a sudden raining 
of voices, calls of " Good-bye," " Good luck," 
" Come back soon," and then a young soldier 
shouted, 

" It 's the women who are winning this war, 
not us fellows! Cheer-o for the war women! " 

33 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

The train moved off with general cheers for all 
the women on the fighting line in England, and 
with who knows what silent prayers for each 
man's woman. And I bowed my head, as I had 
so many times, before the sheer bravery and no- 
bility of just common men and women. Ours, — 
and the enemy's too ; right cause and wrong cause, 
they are fed by the ideals and self-sacrifice of just 
the average man and woman, rising to whatever 
heights of abnegation are demanded. 

It was dark when our train set out from Lon- 
don. There was a thin man in black whose face 
I distrusted; it seemed at once too affable and 
too reticent. There was a little Frenchwoman, 
married to an Englishman, who was a prisoner in 
Germany; she was going back to her own people 
in Lorraine. There was a young Scotch girl from 
Aberdeen, going to teach English in Paris, and 
a sad, pretty girl, married just five days before 
her officer husband went back to the front, and 
now summoned to France because he was mortally 
wounded. 

Poor, blighted, lovely creature! Her grief 
broke through her English reserve and her eyes 
begged me to tell her all the stories I knew of men 
who had been expected to die and who had got 
well. 

" I thought we loved each other so much that 
he could n't die," she whispered. 

Many a young bridegroom goes to the front 
with that faith deep in his heart, and who knows 

34 



ON TO PARIS 

how often it may hold off death? Faith and hope 
are mighty forces. No one knows just what they 
may achieve. The fresh votaries of a love that 
is deep always believe it will triumph over death. 
It is a cruel heart that would voice a doubt. 

Southampton ; porters ; a darkish waiting-room, 
where we sat on benches till our turn came to 
have our passports examined. Shrewd-eyed men 
looked at them, and at us, and passed us on. 

" It 's verra simple," said the Scotch girl. 

" Just you wait till you get to the other side, 
miss," said the door warder with grim relish, — 
" that is, if you get over." 

Regretfully we left him, because he looked as 
if he had a tale to unfold. But the porter who 
carried our bags was of similar pessimistic dis- 
position. He told us that there had been no boat 
allowed to cross for three days, because there were 
two German submarines in the Channel. They 
had been sunk or taken, but there were rumors 
that another had nosed its way in. If that were 
true, he said, as we walked beside him on the 
shadowy dock, then either we should not be al- 
lowed to cross, or else we should be allowed, and 
might be submarined. In any case, we should be 
uncomfortable, as the sea was rough, and the boat 
would have three times the usual number of pas- 
sengers, owing to the delay. 

" However," he said, gloomily, " the boat is 
safe enough. That is, she was condemned six 
months before the war, but she 's been carrying 

35 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

passengers this thirty-five years, and nothing has 
happened to her yet." 

This was so delicious that I laughed, and he 
looked at me chidingly. I could not forbear say- 
ing what I knew was in his mind. 

" But if civilians will cross over," I said, 
" and take up the room that should belong to 
soldiers, then they deserve whatever happens to 
them." 

The thin man in black, just behind us, laughed 
with obvious appreciation, and both the Scotch girl 
and I somehow resented his joining in our little 
party. 

" You 're no verra fearful," said the Scotch 
girl. 

" It is n't exactly courage," I confessed, " but 
I 'm always so dreadfully ill crossing that I would 
as soon drown as not. And if we were submarined, 
I am sure it would cure me of sea-sickness." 

I had offered to chaperone her, and her sober 
look said that a chaperone ought not to be flip- 
pant. But I was not. As she said next day, she 
had not realized till she met me how sea-sick a 
person could get. 

Fate had dealt me the scurvy trick of an upper 
berth. And the moment I looked at the stewardess 
I knew that she would be but a broken reed to 
lean upon. She was less than that. She disap- 
peared at eleven o'clock, and no subsequent ring- 
ing of bells, or heart-rending groans lured her 
out of her hiding place. I still think it was weak 

36 



ON TO PARIS 

in me to give her a tip, but I was afraid she might 
have a son at the front who needed tobacco. It 
was a bad night, but the Scotch girl and I got 
through it by thinking of how much worse off the 
men in the trenches were. In the gray dawn, too 
spent to speak, we somehow got dressed, and 
clung to each other on a damp deck, until a 
stewardess had mercy on us and brought us bitter 
but reviving tea. 

We had to wait several hours before we could 
dock. The pretty, pale wife of the wounded offi- 
cer paced up and down the deck in front of us, 
counting the minutes till we should be released. 
Later, we stood in line, looking down on the 
cobbled stones of Havre, and the tall, shuttered, 
water-side buildings. The wives of wounded offi- 
cers were taken off first, then the Red Cross 
nurses, then officers and privates returning from 
leave, and then we civilians. We were glad to 
know that the wife of the wounded officer would 
be presently on her way to the base hospital at 
Etaples. 

An office, then, where we and our passports 
were to be examined. We filed into a room where, 
behind long, narrow tables, sat officers in horizon- 
blue uniforms, some commissioned and some non- 
commissioned. Their faces were grave, and their 
eyes were keen. I had the same emotion as when 
I went before the alien board at Liverpool, — 
glad I was there for a legitimate purpose, and yet 
with an insane flicker of fear that maybe after all 

37 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

I was guilty of something. I went first, then came 
the Scotch girl, and then the thin man in black. 
As I bent towards the first questioner, I noticed 
that the forehead of the man in black was bedewed 
with a tiny line of beads. 

My passports, my letters and my replies 
seemed satisfactory. I passed around the corner 
table, and there I waited for the Scotch girl. But 
at once I forgot her. For in front of the thin 
man in black four officials had drawn their heads 
together. They rose; they questioned him; he 
wiped his brow; he was affable and explanatory. 
Then he was excited; his pale face grew gray. 
He was summoned to another room; he protested; 
his low voice became suddenly loud. Then he 
made a curious little upward gesture as if of re- 
nunciation, and went out. But he was no longer 
affable ; he was a graven image. 

The Scotch girl had been listening hard. She 
leaped for me, and said, 

" It '11 go gey ill with yon man. He 's a spy. 
They knew it in London, it seems, but they let 
him through to be taken in France. The witnesses 
are on this side. I suppose they '11 shoot him in 
Paris." 

That little Scotch girl got down to essentials. 
We were both so thrilled that we scarcely saw the 
picturesque phases of the customs room, where 
the smiling examiners were women, with an in- 
stinct for those who would be likely to smuggle. 
My examiner opened only one of my suitcases, 

38 



ON TO PARIS 

which was lucky, as the dutiable soap and matches 
were in the top stratum of the other. 

No cab to be had; a long wait in a tram; the 
railroad station, where we checked our hand- 
baggage; then luncheon in a little cafe full of 
officers. The two waitresses seemed unable to 
serve them without embracing them, which is, 
perhaps, of the fortunes of war. We were badly 
served, but too glad to be on solid earth to feel 
any regrets. Afterwards, by special favor, a 
long jaunt to a camp, where we saw some German 
prisoners repairing the roads. I had just been 
preaching a sermon to the Scotch girl to the effect 
that bitterness and hate were disintegrating, and 
that I did not propose to let myself hate anything 
about the Germans except their type of military 
spirit. So, as we passed the enclosure behind 
which they were road-building, pretending that 
we were not looking at them, I did not hate those 
men in the round caps. But I confess it did me 
good to see them working for France, making up 
a bit for what the Germans have exacted from the 
civilians of northern France. 

Back to the station, then ; our hand luggage re- 
trieved, a stout old porter bespoken; as soon as 
the gates were open, we made a quick dash to the 
train, where we had corner seats. We sat smil- 
ing at each other, pleased with the soft gray color- 
ing of our compartment, reading with interest the 
warning: "Be silent! Take care! The ears of 
the enemy are listening." Just beneath the win- 

39 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

dow-sill, we read the order, in French, not to put 
our heads and arms out of the window. Beneath 
that had been the same caution in German; all 
blacked out now. The Frenchwoman whose hus- 
band was a prisoner came in, tentatively. We wel- 
comed her; she took a third corner, and then 
closed her eyes against us. Poor creature! I 
guessed what her thoughts might be, back in 
France once more, without the husband with 
whom, not so many years since, she had gone so 
happily to a strange land. 

" It will be so nice to talk with you all even- 
ing," said the little Scotch girl. 

That, however, was practically the last remark 
she made to me, for into the compartment came 
two English officers, one a lieutenant, a nice- 
looking boy of perhaps twenty-two, the other 
an unbelievably handsome captain of forty. He 
and the Scotch girl fell almost at once into talk, 
while the lieutenant and I read and talked alter- 
nately. The lieutenant told me they were sailing 
for Egypt from Marseilles. I asked, idly, when 
the boat went. 

" Day after to-morrow," he said, " but I have 
a feeling that the captain means to miss it, 
and if he does, there is n't another for two 
weeks ! " 

Later at the dinner table I discovered why the 
captain meant to miss the boat. He sat at a table 
across the aisle from the lieutenant and the little 
Frenchwoman and me, and now and then I saw 

40 



ON TO PARIS 

him, forgetful of the Scotch girl, looking out of 
the window. Once I heard him say, 

" I have n't been to Paris for seventeen years, 
— not since I was a student in the Beaux Arts." 

It was wicked of me, but as we all passed out 
of the dining-car, and he still looked dreamy, I 
could not resist saying to him, 

" I hope you will recapture your romance." 

" Ah, I don't think I will," he said, wistfully. 
Then he blushed crimson, and looked as if he 
would have liked to punish us both. A little later 
he forgave us both, and would have talked, but 
I wanted to look at France under the full moon. 

Such beautiful, peaceful country! Who, gaz- 
ing at the silver sheen that lay over fields and quiet 
houses, could have realized that France was at 
war ! It almost seemed as if even a ruthless con- 
queror, looking at the peace-loving land, asleep 
under that flooding radiance, would have withheld 
his clutching hand. Opposite me the French- 
woman gazed out with wide eyes, seeing, per- 
haps, not her own land, but that unknown German 
prison camp where was held the man she loved. 

Paris ! A tall old clergyman to meet the Scotch 
girl; the young lieutenant saying he was going to 
the Ritz ; the handsome captain not saying where 
he was going, but still looking romantic ; the little 
Frenchwoman suddenly turning, helpless and 
nervous. She did not know where she ought to 
stay; I think she had some hazy notion of going 
to the Gare du Nord, and sitting there till the 

41 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

next morning when she could entrain for Lor- 
raine. She had suddenly turned into a little 
fearful provincial, afraid of Paris. 

I took her to the hotel I had chosen, and next 
morning I escorted her to the Gare du Nord. It 
was still dark when we called our cab. The streets 
of Paris were a deep blue-black, echoing, vast, lit 
here and there by a flickering light. There was 
a sort of high brooding spirit over those streets, 
as if they were waiting for life to pour into them 
and would accept that life, whatever its nature. 

When we got to the Gare du Nord, it was not 
quite so dark. A sort of crepuscular blue lay 
everywhere, and against it poured group after 
group of French soldiers. I thought that I had 
already realized the war, that my imagination and 
my sympathy had been fully sounded. But there 
was that in the faces and the souls of those men 
in horizon-blue that leaped all barriers, was out- 
spoken and clear in meaning. Looking into their 
faces, I felt the war as not only the greatest trag- 
edy of this world, not only a personal sorrow but 
a crime against all the ages that have gone as 
well as those to come, a crime against whatever 
other worlds there may be. There, in that deep 
azure dawn, I could hear the voices of young 
poets, dead before their time, calling out for the 
years that had been denied them; scientists, bear- 
ing in their ghostly hands the tally of the dis- 
coveries that would have benefited mankind; 
humanitarians, who would have lifted the woe of 

42 



ON TO PARIS 

the world, — I seemed to feel the weight of their 
wonder that their days and their deeds had not 
been fulfilled. I seemed to hear the voices of 
unborn children, asking for the gift of life. In 
every land, this world over, the girls who should 
have been their mothers will go to their graves, 
the best half of their lives forbidden them. 

It was the look of the men in horizon-blue that 
brought the war home to me with wringing pain. 
Not two days before I had seen English soldiers 
going back to the front, and that had been a 
poignant enough sight. But at least the English- 
men had just come from their homes. Not so 
these Frenchmen. Many of them were from the 
invaded districts ; they did not know whether any 
longer they had families and homes. And all of 
them knew that France was bleeding to death. 
Their faces, patient, immobile, bore the mark of 
a tragedy that went beyond personal grief. 
Brave men in blue! The white flame of France; 
their very souls were burnt offerings. 

They stood there in the station, some with 
women, some alone. They made strange sil- 
houettes, so grotesquely burdened were their 
backs, with motley equipment — bags, canteens, 
shoes, tins, even loaves of bread. The men who 
were alone went out to the platform where they 
were to take the train. The others remained in 
the station, saying good-bye. I passed through 
them, my head lowered, but even so I could not 
entirely shut out the sight of those hundreds of 

43 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

poignant partings. The packs on the ground, the 
clinging tragic arms, the murmured words, — and 
more than all, the silence; each little group sepa- 
rated infinitely from every other little group; 
each afraid the parting was eternal. A sol- 
dier was trying to put his little girl in her 
mother's arms; the child held to him, begging 
him not to go, while his wife stood by, smil- 
ing, with white, pinched lips. I heard a man 
say to a girl, " I shall come back, for you are 
waiting." The men left their wives without turn- 
ing back. I have never seen a Frenchwoman 
weep, nor a Frenchman look back at what he is 
leaving. What a microcosm of the anguish of all 
France ! 

I forgot that little home on the Marne that had 
called me so persistently. I never thought of it 
again as standing out separately from the rest of 
the anguish of France. It was just part of that 
great foreground of grief of the beautiful mar- 
tyred land, which has been for so long the be- 
loved pleasure ground of the world. I realized 
as I had not before how changed must be all of 
France. I knew that I had come to a new Paris, 
— to Paris, no longer the gay and debonair, but 
the city of unshed tears, the city of the dauntless 
heart. 



44 



CHAPTER IV 

The City of the Dauntless Heart 

Once I read a description of Paris that ex- 
pressed very adroitly the conventional idea 
of it as a playground. 

". . . there came before her eyes a picture of 
that vivid city, putting on her jewels in the frivo- 
lous lute-stringed twilight. Like a city of fire- 
flies it flashed into her imagination, and the sound 
of it came back to her, gay and sad as one of its 
own chansonettes, that wonderful murmur of 
Paris, like the sound of a great shallow river, 
blended with the singing of many sirens; that 
seems to be calling you — to come and drown, to 
come and drown, to come and drown." 

To the people who live in Paris, who do not feel 
its romance as the tourist does, — or did — this 
description may have less meaning than that of 
Zola in his novel " Paris," where Pierre, stand- 
ing on a height in the diffused golden light of sun- 
set, sees " all Paris spread itself out at his feet, 
a limpid lightsome Paris, beneath the pink glow 
of that spring-like evening. The endless billows 
of house roofs showed forth with wonderful dis- 
tinctness, and one could have counted millions of 
chimney stacks and the little black streaks of the 
windows. The buildings rising into the calm air 

45 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

seemed like the anchored vessels of some fleet 
arrested in its course, with lofty masting, glitter- 
ing in the sunset. And never before had Pierre 
so distinctly observed the divisions of that human 
ocean. Eastward and northward was the city of 
manual toil, with the rumbling and the smoke of 
its factories. Southward, beyond the river, was 
the city of study, of intellectual labor, so calm, so 
utterly serene. And on all sides the passion of 
trade ascended from the central districts, where 
the crowds rolled and scrambled amidst an ever- 
lasting uproar of wheels; while westward the city 
of the happy and powerful ones, those who fought 
for sovereignty and wealth, spread out its piles of 
palaces amidst the slowly reddening light." 

Before the war there was perhaps the tendency 
to interpret Paris according to some preconceived 
idea one carried there. But now each visitor finds 
his own Paris, a new, grave Paris, set to the note 
of war. The playground Paris was perhaps best 
symbolized by the Champs Elysees, that empress- 
like Avenue, glorious, from the Place de l'Etoile, 
under the arch of which the men in horizon-blue 
will march when victory has come, to the wide 
Place de la Concorde; and further, by the Rue de 
Rivoli, that sparkling street of the ladies, where 
the gear and gauds of all the world are spread out 
to allure and conquer. How triumphant were 
these streets in leisure, gaiety, charm and color! 
Changed now, they show courage and cheerful- 
ness, but no gaiety, and the prevailing colors are 

46 



THE DAUNTLESS HEART 

the horizon-blue of the soldiers, and the black 
of the widows. Lift the eyes above the street 
level, and look towards the river, and there is 
indeed a vision of Paris as she was, — a city lovely 
as a dream, rising above the Seine, the lordly 
bridges, and the straight, bordering trees. But 
keep the gaze lowered and straight, and there is 
the new Paris, symbolized by men in blue, march- 
ing to the trains that are to take them back to the 
front-line trenches. 

The day after I reached Paris, as I walked 
down these wide streets, my eyes were filled with 
a picture I had not seen — the picture of the sol- 
diers of France, on the day of mobilization, march- 
ing, laughing and shouting and singing in their 
dark blue coats and red trousers. They sang the 
Marseillaise; they improvised doggerel couplets 
about the Kaiser and the Germans. They called 
out greetings to the civilians on the sidewalk. 
They said they would be back in three months, 
carrying Alsace and Lorraine with them. It was 
a glad, united, confident Paris. Perhaps in the 
exultant crowds there might have been old men 
and women who remembered the Franco-Prussian 
days, who knew well that the long red march of 
war is slow. But if so, their sad faces of warning 
were disregarded. Paris laughed, and the men 
swung down the Champs Elysees to the slaughter 
of the Marne, and those who marched through 
that went on to the bloody morass of Verdun. 

That was the vision I saw in the wide empty 
47 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

avenues, and even as I looked on these dream 
figures, real ones took their place. Down the 
Champs Elysees to the Place de la Concorde 
marched two companies of men in blue. They 
were laden and weary. They did not sing or 
speak or look at the thin stream of people on the 
sidewalks. As they struck across the Place de la 
Concorde, I noticed that the lap of the figure 
that represents the city of Strasbourg was piled 
high with wreaths and flowers that concealed the 
black band which shows that Germany still holds 
Strasbourg. Some of the soldiers glanced up. 
That statue symbolized to them the greedy hands 
of Germany at the throat of France. They were 
ready to die to prevent further murderous theft, 
yet their faces no longer showed deep determina- 
tion, wild enthusiasm, only a weary stoicism. 
The glory is departed; their teeth are set to en- 
dure the bitter, monotonous, grinding pressure. 

As they passed into the Rue de Rivoli, and I 
went back up the Champs Elysees, I saw other 
signs of the new Paris, — the convalescent sol- 
diers, sitting languidly on the benches, or perhaps 
leaning on the arms of friends or wives; the 
women in black, leading little fatherless children 
with crepe bands on their arms, the little closed 
jewel shops and patisseries, great hotels changed 
into hospitals or vestiaires or ouvroirs. Ah, it was 
poignant, — and yet the faces I saw were not, as 
a rule, sad. Serious, and yet often smiling. 
People are glad of a chance to smile. 

48 



THE DAUNTLESS HEART 

The first smile I discovered, however, came 
from me. Opposite the underground station 
Alma a gendarme was trying to arrest a man. He 
and his prospective prisoner were arguing and a 
knot of half a dozen people were taking sides, 
for and against the arrest. That lasted for fully 
half an hour, I looking on and listening delighted, 
while two wounded soldiers were delighted in turn 
at my amusement, which they could not under- 
stand. But fancy a policeman in New York or 
Chicago arguing with a law-breaker as to whether 
he did or did not deserve arrest! 

" Come along to the police station and talk 
there," would be the kindest remark he would 
get. 

But this gendarme was saying, 

" Monsieur, I am desolated; but, in line, mon- 
sieur will have to give himself the trouble of 
accompanying me. This way, if monsieur 
pleases! " 

After the gendarme had taken away his pris- 
oner, with all the solicitude of a trained nurse, the 
two wounded soldiers utilized the crowd by run- 
ning a race to the underground station. One had 
a cork leg and one a wooden leg. They hobbled 
along, laughing, gallant. The crowd smiled, — 
but with a stricture of the throat. 

It is chiefly the children who are spontaneous 
in their smiles. Across the street I could hear 
their childish peals of laughter coming from the 
midst of another crowd. I crossed the street to 

49 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

see what it was, — a play of marionettes, — Les 
Guignoles. Little children sat on benches, looking 
and laughing at the jumping dolls. Outside was 
a fringe of black-clad nurses and mothers and a 
few wounded soldiers, smiling gravely at the joy 
of these little ones. Perhaps they remembered 
that they were pledged to offer their lives in order 
that little ones such as these might grow up into 
a world where war was not. 

" Take care, Guignol," the little voices cried. 
" Strike quickly, Guignol! Hurry! " 

The crowd grew thicker, looking not so much at 
the marionettes as at the children. 

" Ah, ha ! " said a poilu, who held a little girl 
in his arms. "That's good fighting there; see 
the blow Guignol got on his pate ! That 's war ! 
C'est la guerre! " 

I was to learn that the expression " C'est la 
guerre " (it 's war) does not invariably stand for 
horrors. Whenever a Parisian can say lightly 
" Cest la guerre " he likes to do it, especially 
to a stranger. Every time it was said to me it 
had some connection, superficial or vital, with 
the high cost of living, though in the beginning I 
did not perceive this. The first time it was said 
to me was a few days after I reached Paris, while 
I was waiting patiently for permission to go to 
the front. 

I drifted into a little teashop with the idea one 
has that where there is the sign " English spoken " 
the tea will be unusually good. As usual, the per- 

50 



THE DAUNTLESS HEART 

son who spoke English was out, and the tea was 
good. But there was no napkin and the wonder- 
ful French cakes were sticky. I requested a nap- 
kin. The waiter looked amused, shrugged his 
shoulders, thrust out his hands palms upward, and 
said: 

" Ak, madame, c'est impossible; c'est la 
guerre! " 

He spoke and looked over his smile with just 
the faintest touch of reproach, just enough to 
induce in me the remorseful thought that I wanted 
luxuries when there were soldiers in the trenches 
who did not have common comforts. I saw other 
people surreptitiously wiping their fingers on the 
table-cloth, looking dreamily the while across the 
room, or else leaning forward and chatting ani- 
matedly as if to disguise what they were doing, 
and so — 

That same evening I went to dine in a restau- 
rant in the Rue Leopold Robert, famous the Latin 
Quarter over for the frescoes and pictures on 
the walls done by New York and Chicago artists, 
for a signed portrait of Victor Hugo, and for 
other unexpected pleasures. I sat down at a 
table from which four people had risen and, my 
mind being on linen, noticed the good yeoman 
service the table-cloth had done. From all signs 
it had been used for luncheon as well as dinner. 
I dined, being joined by three strangers who ate 
frugally and departed. At the cheese stage I felt 
eyes, and, looking up, saw four people waiting 

5i 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

for my table. They were gazing hungrily right 
through me, just wanting my place, hypnotized 
by their own desire. Under that stare nothing 
but the laws of gravity could have kept me in my 
seat. I fled and let them sit down, standing by the 
kitchenette till my bill was made out. There was 
one illegible item for which I could not account — 
ten cents for what? 

" What is this that I have eaten, Henriette? " I 
asked. 

" Ah, madame, ' couvrir ' — chiefly for the 
table-cloth. The laundry assassinates me with the 
charges. O est la guerre! " 

I counted, say, eight people at the cloth for 
luncheon, and the twelve I had seen with my own 
eyes at dinner — two dollars. That diligent cloth 
paid for itself every day. 

When I entered my hotel that night I dis- 
covered that the ceiling light was none too bright 
and that there was no reading-lamp. I rang for 
the garqon and ordered one. He said that he 
would speak toute suite to the housekeeper, who 
was now dining. I allowed her plenty of time to 
dine, and then went in search of her. She was all 
plump obligingness. 

" But yes, madame ; I will find a lamp for 
madame." 

Madame thought it prudent to accompany her 
on the search, and was led to a closet, on the top 
shelf of which stood two lamps. The house- 
keeper greeted them with an exclamation of ap- 

52 



THE DAUNTLESS HEART 

proval. I did not, for I saw that the con- 
nection of each was broken. She acted as if she 
had discovered this only when she took them 
down. 

" Ah, unhappily they are broken ! I am so 
sorry that madame cannot have a lamp." 

" Get them mended," suggested madame. 

" Ah, but impossible. C'est la — " 

" Yes, I know, it's the war; but are there no 
electricians left in Paris? " 

I gathered that they were all at the front except 
a few, who somehow could not repair lamps be- 
cause it was the war. 

The next morning was evidently the time for 
weekly presentations of bills at the hotel. There 
was the sum per diem which the proprietor had 
mentioned to me, and at the bottom a neat little 
addition of ten per cent. I sought this man, an 
agreeable person whose charm took the edge from 
all financial transactions. 

" What is this ten per cent item for? " I asked. 

" Ah, madame, c'est la guerre." 

He indicated, delicately, a notice on the wall, 
none too conspicuously placed. It announced that 
on a certain date the hotel proprietors had met at 
the Palais d'Orsay, and, in view of the increased 
cost of living and to save themselves from disaster, 
had decided to increase their charges by ten per 
cent. The notice added that at the meeting nearly 
all the hotel proprietors agreed to the proposition 
that guests should be informed of the change by 

53 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

signs placed in the establishment — a pleasant 
muffled way of doing things. 

I went to call on a friend who keeps house. 
She was dressed for marketing, and I thought her 
ecstatic greetings of me were touched with a hint 
of appraisal. 

" You don't carry a muff? " she questioned; " a 
large muff? " 

I replied that I occasionally carried one forth, 
but never carried it back unless it was attached 
to me. 

" Well, if you would n't mind wearing one of 
mine," she said, " and coming with me, then, you 
see, you could buy a pound of loaf sugar and so 
could I, at every shop where we stop. I 've not 
got a lump left, and no shop will sell you more 
than a pound at a time, and I simply must have 
some because of Celeste." 

" Celeste? " I questioned. 

" My waitress. She is doing her bit for France 
by having me give teas for the young French girls 
I know, to which our ambulance boys are invited. 
1 Why not,' says Celeste, ( the men they should 
be fianceed to are at the front, or dead ! Why not 
give the nice American boys an opportunity? ' So 
I do, but Celeste insists on loaf sugar." 

We descended to the street, while my friend 
bewailed the arrogance of Celeste and her sort, 
who could so easily get work now in the munition 
factories at seven francs a day. 

" C y est la guerre" she sighed. " The only 
54 



THE DAUNTLESS HEART 

thing that binds her to me, besides these little teas 
I give, is the little baby from Epernay. At the 
time the Germans came in there a French soldier 
found this baby, apparently only a few hours old, 
on a doorstep. He was on his way to Paris, and 
he took it along, under his coat. For three days 
neither he nor the baby had anything to eat, but 
he fed it water and kept it warm. In Paris he 
gave it to his marraine, who is my next-door 
neighbor. The concierge of his marraine is his 
mother; this mother is also Celeste's aunt, and 
they are all mad over the baby, — a beautiful 
blue-eyed girl who sings like a bird, and of whose 
parentage none of us has been able to find any 
trace." 

That was a pretty little story; one comes across 
them now at every turn in or out of the war zone. 
I mused over it while my friend moaned over 
sugar tickets and butter tickets, eggs at a dollar 
a dozen, and paper that had gone up four hundred 
per cent, while alcohol had gone up seven hundred 
per cent. 

At the street corner we waited in vain for a 
taxi. We hailed drivers, who kissed their hands 
to us and passed on, or shouted that they had no 
gasoline, or were going to their dejeuner, or to 
meet a brother just back from the front. So we 
went by the crowded metropolitan to the shopping 
region and got more sugar than we should have, 
and returned weary, feeling all the guilty relish 
of hoarders. 

55 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

" Never mind," my friend said, " we 're doing 
this for the French girls." 

On the way back we passed a coal yard. A long 
line of people stood beside it, carrying baskets 
and sacks. There were stout housewives in blue 
aprons, some with little girls beside them; there 
were bareheaded, bent, old women; there were 
old men on canes; there were little boys in long 
black aprons. All of them had the look of having 
been waiting a long time, but they were very 
patient. They had the air one sees in the soldiers 
— brave, weary, tenacious; it is the spirit of all 
France. When I spoke to some of them they 
said they had been standing for hours, that none 
of them could have more than twenty pounds of 
coal, and that coal was fifty dollars a ton. 

" I 'm afraid it will be very cold for the poor 
this winter," I said that night to Jeanne, my old 
mending-woman. " It is a good thing the Govern- 
ment is going to take still more strenuous meas- 
ures. At least they are talking — " 

"Oh, la, la," cried Jeanne; "how they talk, 
these people, and France wasting, wasting. Do 
not I know? Did they not waste my only son, ~ 
Pierre, wounded in the leg at the battle of the 
Marne? A little, little wound that I could have 
cured! But they sent him, not to a hospital in 
Paris, seventeen miles from the place where he 
was shot, but to the very borders of Spain. In 
all those days of travel the wound was not cared 
for, and at times he had to walk." 

56 



THE DAUNTLESS HEART 

Old Jeanne's wrinkled face was grim. 

" It is to laugh," she said, her voice hard; 
" they say we must close the shops at six to save 
light and heat; but they close them from twelve 
to two for luncheon; no saving there, because they 
choose to eat long, long meals. Madame has 
eaten the luncheon and dinners of these civilians 
who are telling the soldiers to fight to the end. 
Two and three meat courses, always. Waste 
there, eh, madame? But my neighbor, Elise, 
threw herself and her three children out of the 
window last Friday because there was not enough 
to eat and she could not get work. Madame 
read of it in the papers. And the Apaches, who 
were good enough soldiers — they have come 
back discharged from the army without pen- 
sions, because they were only consumptive, or had 
heart trouble, or were not very badly wounded. 
They too are hungry, madame. The soldiers 
waste their blood, and the rich waste meat and 
cake, and the poor have not enough food, and the 
Government talks of what it will do to save ! Ah, 
la, la ! my Pierre dead, and France dying, and the 
Government talking! " 

Waste! What country except Germany is not 
guilty of it? Certainly we are, in the United 
States, and even France is. There are wasters in 
Paris, scarlet ladies who lie in wait even more 
assiduously than in times of peace for the men 
who will pay most; decent women who think they 
must have their mourning of the latest cut; officers 

57 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

who buy expensive strings of pearls and go back 
to die in the trenches; gourmands who would eat 
long meals if Paris were burning as well as bleed- 
ing. There are some who adopt the motto of 
Louis XV: " After us the deluge." 

Yet most of the French people are economizing 
wisely, are trying to make their sacrifices in keep- 
ing with those of the men in the trenches who 
die for them. They plan for a lean future, yet 
they live by the day, — by the very hour, keeping 
up a show of courage over grief and suspense. 
The longer I stayed in Paris the more keenly I 
felt how heavy were the hearts hidden under the 
brave, weary smiles. I was constantly stumbling 
upon some bit of drama or tragedy. Once I was 
passing a cafe where a middle-aged man and 
woman were sitting together at a little table drink- 
ing light wine. Their daughter came to them to 
say that a telegram had arrived, and Jacques, little 
Jacques, had received the croix de querre for res- 
cuing a comrade under fire, — their little Jacques, 
who had enlisted, who was only seventeen ! What 
friendly hands clasped those of the father and 
mother ! What cries of " Vive la France! " 

Again I stopped before a building where was 
being posted the most recent list of those who 
had died on the field of honor. A woman read 
her husband's name ! That white, stricken face 
of hers; her blind pushing out of the crowd, that 
made way for her silently, pitifully; the agonized 
way she clutched the baby asleep on her breast! 

58 



THE DAUNTLESS HEART 

And not ten feet away from her three young 
girls were smiling over a letter just received from 
the front, as oblivious to the crowd as she was. 
An qld man who had seen both episodes cast out 
his hands with a gesture of resignation, of giving 
up any attempt to explain the events of this sorry 
world. It reminded me, in some obscure way, of 
the gesture of the spy whom I had seen taken 
a few days before at Havre. 

Everywhere the sense of unshed tears; in the 
refugees, where were the people from northern 
France and from Belgium, who had been harried 
from their homes by the encroaching Germans; 
in the vestiaires and ouvroirs where poor people 
came for work and for clothes; in the canteens 
where soldiers, unable to get home, came for food, 
and for friendship from the gentle women who 
served them; in those other canteens across the 
river, in the Latin Quarter, where painters and 
models and other workers in the arts would have 
starved but for the kindness of friends. And above 
all, in the churches! In the streets people must 
wear that brave badge of courage, a smile. In 
their own houses they must smile for the sake of 
each other. Only in the churches dare they be 
themselves, for they are alone with God. 

That little church of Notre Dame des Champs ! 
For decades it has been the church of the soldiers 
and the women. The soldiers have gone to pray 
for safety or to give thanks for it; and the women 
have gone to pray that their men may come home 

59 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

to them safe and, if possible, sound, and that 
there may be no more war. On the walls are 
hung many medals given as thank-offerings by 
soldiers who survived the Franco-Prussian war. 
A dim place that church, where the eternal ruby 
light glows, serene and still, before the high altar. 
Many little columns of pale flame-topped candles 
have been lighted by women in honor of the Vir- 
gin or their name-saint. Velvet whispers come to 
one's ears; faint wafts of incense. 

And the women, — they kneel before their 
candles and pray passionately for the men they 
love. They have forgotten to smile; their tense 
figures, their anguished faces show the force of 
their pleading, their suffering. There a woman is 
swaying back and forth, her soul demanding as- 
surance. The soldiers kneel quietly. One holds 
his croix de guerre in his hands instead of a rosary; 
it may be that he is making some sort of simple 
bargain with God. A girl comes in breathless, a 
candle in one hand, a letter from her lover or per- 
haps from her husband, in the other. She lights 
her candle. Her lips move fast; her eyes are 
far away, perhaps attempting to see an un- 
known battleground. I remember what Lisette, 
the midinette, said, 

" He must have died out there as I prayed, 
madame. He must, for I was always praying." 

The old priest, his face white and sad over his 
rich vestments, begins to celebrate mass before 
the high altar. In the dim light the people seem 

60 



THE DAUNTLESS HEART 

like blue and black shadows. They droop towards 
the priest. A faint sigh floats over the congrega- 
tion. There, at the altar of God, the people of 
Paris kneel for comfort, for help. 



61 



CHAPTER V 

Waiting for the War Zone 

On the Rue Frangois Premier stands a stately 
white building, a little way from the Champs 
Elysees, and flanked on the right by that busy 
place, the American Clearing House, where our 
own flag floats, and where the big business of help- 
ing to send supplies to the French wounded and 
needy is conducted with shining efficiency and 
promptness. 

This stately white building is one to which all 
newspaper correspondents and magazine writers 
must betake themselves humbly. In it is the 
Maison de la Presse, which gives permission to 
writing civilians to visit the war zone. Many 
writers call themselves for this privilege, and few 
are chosen. Those few, too, must wait, — and 
rightly so, because every civilian who uses the rail- 
way up to the war zone, or who uses a military 
motor in the war zone, subtracts just so much 
from the military welfare of France. Whatever 
value he may have is secondary in importance to 
anything that has to do with the business of war. 

In London I had already met an important 
official of the Maison de la Presse. A powerful 
English friend introduced us with such kind 
words of the magazines for which I was writing, 

62 



WAITING FOR THE WAR ZONE 

and of me, that the official promised, if it were 
possible, to have arrangements made for my war 
zone trips by the time I should arrive in Paris. 
Therefore, when, a month later, I entered that 
stately building on the Rue Frangois Premier, I 
did not realize the days of waiting before me. 
I realized it still less after I had met the other 
charming Frenchmen who control the destinies of 
war correspondents. 

The only thing that dashed me in that white 
building was the elevator. It was one of those 
tiny toy cages which you are supposed to control 
yourself. I had n't been afraid of submarines 
or Zeppelins, but I was afraid of that gilded and 
upholstered box. I felt the way I always do when 
I am trying to cross Fifth Avenue at Thirty-fourth 
Street, and cannot believe that the policeman 
really can hold all that traffic back. How could 
I ever figure out the way to run it ! I waited for 
ten minutes, timid as any soldier ever was before 
a bombardment. Then when I saw a man coming 
to rescue me, shame overpowered me. 

" I'm a voter," I thought, " not a clinging vine. 
I 'm here to do dangerous things, such as visiting 
the front." 

I touched a button, closed my eyes, and shot 
upward, while below me I heard a drawling Eng- 
lish voice say, 

"My word! Just missed the lift! That lady 
must have been an American, she was so anxious 
to look after herself! " 

63 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

A long passage, — a messenger with the impor- 
tant face civilians with long-distance war connec- 
tion seem to have. I had noticed those important 
faces in Whitehall. I have seen them since in 
Washington on the clerks and bellboys of hotels 
where the Council of National Defense people 
stay. I have never seen that expression on the 
faces of the men engaged in the business of fight- 
ing and dying. 

After that, two delightful hours when I talked 
to Monsieur Pousot, the head of the Maison de 
la Presse, and Monsieur Monod, the censor, and 
Madame Saint-Marie Perrin, the daughter of 
Rene Bazu. They all listened to the wishes I ex- 
pressed to go to this and that place, commended 
the ideas I had for this and that article, entered 
with zest into the planning of this and that excur- 
sion, and promised that I should go just as soon as 
it could be managed. Before our talk was over 
I felt as if I were already on the train. 

Monsieur Monod, who has been a professor in 
one of our universities, and who understands the 
American tendency to prompt action, warned me 
that I must not expect to get to the war zone 
straight away. 

" You will understand, madame," he said, 
"that there are difficulties; the movement of 
troops; — the many details — ! " 

Kindly, gentle Monsieur Monod! I have a 
feeling of the deepest gratitude towards him. He 
was so patient in reading over and censoring my 

64 



WAITING FOR THE WAR ZONE 

badly written notes, so wise and sympathetic in 
counselling me in any difficulties. The Maison de 
la Presse has there a valuable official, and Amer- 
ica has a good friend. But indeed, all the officials 
of the Maison de la Presse appreciate the atti- 
tude towards France shown in the magazines and 
newspapers of the United States. 

But despite M. Monod's warning, I walked on 
air out of the Maison de la Presse, and down the 
Champs Elysees and on to the Place Vendome, 
and round a corner to my hotel. And there I 
waited. And waited. 

The nicest thing about that hotel, and about 
my period of waiting, was Eleanor, — and her 
dog. I mention them together because Eleanor 
was so fond of him, but I preferred to think of 
them apart. I saw Eleanor first the evening after 
my arrival, when I was looking at all the desks 
in the reception room for a bottle of ink and could 
not find any — because " a' est la guerre" I sup- 
pose. Eleanor looked up from a table, and 
offered her own ink, with such a giving sort of 
smile, in which blue eyes and soft lips and shadowy 
dimple and a little gesture all struggled for su- 
premacy. To see Eleanor look and smile and 
come into a room in her out-going, friendly 
fashion is worth a journey. As is usual, in war 
time, we made a short cut to friendship, which 
was the quicker because I found that I already 
knew her father. 

Eleanor had come over pledged to be a private 
65 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

secretary in some ouvroir outside of Paris, and 
was now serenely expecting that job to melt away 
and another to appear. Exactly that happened. 
Eleanor has been called " the happy-go-lucky sort 
that falls on her feet." She is n't just that. But 
she has a serene, smiling way of expecting what 
she likes to happen to her; she plans for it with- 
out exactly seeming to, and when her plans go 
awry she makes others. She is easy-going in that 
she never murmurs over bad luck, and smiles no 
matter what happens. 

We sat that first day of our companionship 
looking out upon the Paris twilight, and making 
acquaintance with the dog which Eleanor had just 
bought. He was a bargain, and a beautiful crea- 
ture, but Eleanor had no more real right to him 
than a soldier has to a trunk in the trenches. She 
had no place to keep him, and besides her letter 
of credit was running out and she had forgotten 
to write home for funds. She lured the concierge 
into taking care of him, — at a price. Then, pres- 
ently, she got work in a hospital just outside the 
city, where she was kept so busy that she scarcely 
ever saw him. I did n't see him either, but at in- 
tervals throughout the nights and the early morn- 
ings I heard him, for the concierge kept him in the 
court on which my bedroom looked. Eleanor, 
herself, is one of those people who would sleep 
through a San Francisco earthquake or a bom- 
bardment. The garcon who brought her break- 
fast had his orders always to wake her; the poor 

66 



WAITING FOR THE WAR ZONE 

lad did his best, but frequently when he came back 
to get the tray, Eleanor would be still asleep. If 
it had been anyone but Eleanor I should have told 
her, with dark meaning, that there was more 
poetic justice in a wakeful person keeping a dog 
than one like herself. * 

" Eleanor," I would ask meekly, " what pleas- 
ure does that dog give you ? " 

" I like the thought of him," Eleanor would 
reply; " I like to think he is mine. I like to re- 
member that I gave fifteen dollars for him when 
he 's worth fifty. I expect to sell him, and make 
a lot of money off him." 

She did not sell him. Without her knowing it 
she made a present of him ! One morning I slept 
late, for no dog had barked. 

"Where's the dog, Eleanor?" I asked that 
night, as we sat at dinner in the lower dining-room, 
which Eleanor chose because there was so much to 
see in it. " Did you give him away? " 

" In a sense I did," said Eleanor, with that little 
muffled laugh of hers that makes me think of all 
sorts of young, happy things. " You know that 
group of Scotch soldiers that passed through here 
last night? Perhaps you saw them petting the 
dog? Well, the concierge says they needed a mas- 
cot, and so — " 

I shook my head. 

" The Scotch are thrifty," I admitted, " but so 
is that concierge. If he let the mascot go it was n't 
as a gift." 

67 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

"That idea also crossed my mind," Eleanor 
said. " I 'm sure, if I had kept him, I 'd have sold 
him for sixty dollars, but I 'm glad the soldiers 
have him." 

After that it was Eleanor without the dog who 
solaced my days of waiting for the war zone, — 
Eleanor and Paris. The hotel was in the centre 
of things, and plenty of life flowed through the 
dining-room and the crowded little foyer where 
the incoming guests asked for rooms and out- 
going guests asked for mail. The lower dining- 
room glittered with the color of uniforms. Here 
came French officers, lunching with each other, 
or with lady friends; English officers, Russians 
and Italians, and Brazilians. Here came English 
and Scotch nurses on their way to their hospitals. 
Here were Americans on business bent, manu- 
facturers of cork legs, of wheeled chairs; traf- 
fickers in the sad havoc of war. 

There was enough life going on to satisfy me 
even if I never got to the war zone. Once two 
serious young Scotch privates in kilts stayed in the 
hotel for three days. Their leave was too short 
to go to England, and they had come to Paris, 
where they knew nobody. For two days they 
stalked gravely up and down the streets of Paris, 
alien to all the sights they saw. Meal after meal 
they sat in silence in the dining-room, gazing 
blankly about them. A Scotch nurse talked to 
them. She was pretty and sympathetic, — but 
middle-aged. She wrung her hands over their 
loneliness. 

68 



WAITING FOR THE WAR ZONE 

" If only I were a young girl," she said; " those 
poor laddies ! For so long they have looked for- 
ward to this holiday. I know, as well as if they 'd 
told me. And now to be in this strange place." 

We conspired; we found two nice, pretty, warm- 
hearted, sensible American girls, and we explained 
to them that here was their bit right at hand. 
They did it with zest and tact, and for that last 
day of their leave those Scotch lads were happy 
from ten in the morning, when they began to smile, 
till midnight, when we saw them off in the rail- 
way station, loaded with gifts and, I believe, with 
some joyful memories. 

But we did not entirely like the hotel. 

" If the concierge really did sell your dog — " 
I said to Eleanor. 

" And if the proprietor really is an Austrian," 
she replied. 

" Besides," I said, " I don't feel happy with 
Victor and Antoinette." 

Victor and Antoinette were the valet and cham- 
bermaid who were supposed to look after my 
room. Much as I love the French, much as I 
revere them for the way they have stood up to 
this war, there are certain of their customs that will 
always be alien to me. One is to have a man and 
woman combine together to do the bedroom work 
which one, alone, could do quite as well, and more 
quickly. 

" What 's the matter with Victor and Antoi- 
nette?" inquired Eleanor. "Your room looks 
as well kept as mine." 

69 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

"They aren't properly arranged, those two," 
I complained. " Antoinette's husband is at Ver- 
dun, and her little girl is in the Midi. Victor's 
wife is working in a munitions factory outside 
Nancy. It is n't symmetrical, somehow. It 's a 
kind of waste — " 

" Your duty," said Eleanor severely, " is to 
write, not to revise the domestic arrangement of 
people. Put it down to c' est la guerre. The diffi- 
culty with you is that you care too much for happy 
and suitable endings. Start you out writing a 
story with six persons and you end with three 
couples." 

Then we stopped laughing. This war had 
made us both anxious for happy endings. We 
went back to the subject of moving, deciding that 
a new hotel would help break the period of wait- 
ing. For by this time Eleanor was waiting, too, 
having put powerful influence at work so that she 
might get to at least one place at the front. She 
meant to pay for it by some writing. 

Once settled in our new hotel we found that it 
also was suspected of being managed by an Aus- 
trian. But we overlooked that, so pleased were 
we with our spacious dining-room and reception 
room, and with our concierge, Henri, who had 
lost a leg and two fingers in the war. On his 
broad breast he wore two medals, and because he 
was so brave, and because he came from the 
Marne country that I loved, I forgave him his 
forgetfulness of messages. This hotel was not 

70 



WAITING FOR THE WAR ZONE 

in the heart of Paris; it seemed more directly 
connected with civilian life or with military life 
of an unstrenuous type. There was the French 
officer, on long leave, with his wife, and four little 
girls with their nurse and governess. Noisy, 
happy youngsters they were, and attractive; but 
it was Eleanor's opinion that the father and 
mother had no right to send those vivacious in- 
fants into the dining-room just when most of us 
were at dinner, coming down themselves much 
later, when it was quite quiet. There was the 
English officer and his bride, people verging 
towards middle age. I noticed that whenever we 
talked the officer listened to us. He did not seem 
to, for he kept his smiling eyes on his wife, and 
appeared to be absorbed in her. A certain glaze 
across his eyes, however, told me that his atten- 
tion was not with her. Eleanor, to whom news 
flew like homing birds, discovered that he was 
somehow concerned with the British intelligence 
service, and was supposed to be a masterhand at 
ferreting out spies. 

There was the tall handsome French officer with 
his mother. His days of soldiering were over, 
for he had lost a leg. How that mother's face 
told her feelings ! Sometimes, when a woman in 
black entered the dining-room, she would look at 
her son with a world of gratitude in her eyes. He 
was alive; mutilated, but alive. Again, when he 
had difficulty in rising from the table, or when, in 
his slow progress on crutches, he slipped on the 

7i 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

polished floor, her face showed her grief, that the 
lot of war had marred the strength and ability of 
this man, made, it would almost seem, by nature, 
to show how beautiful could be her human 
handiwork. 

There was the Russian aviator, and his mar- 
ralne. She was a woman of perhaps sixty, who 
had been beautiful, a woman whose face showed 
that she had had much experience and was still 
avid of life. She used some of her great wealth 
in taking wounded soldiers to stay with her during 
their period of convalescence. She and the avia- 
tor seemed never to run out of subjects of conver- 
sation. There was the Russian nurse, who had 
picked up patients under fire. There was the quiet 
French civilian about whom even Eleanor heard 
nothing; he looked strong, — could he be a 
slacker, an embusquef There were the two 
American expatriates who were giving all their 
time and money to ambulance work. There were 
various American women working in ouvroirs. 
There were American ambulance boys who came 
in for an occasional meal. One of them had 
earned a croix de guerre for acting as a stretcher- 
bearer under fire. 

"Why don't you wear it?" a woman asked 
him. 

He glanced over at Henri, the concierge, labo- 
riously sorting mail with mutilated hand. His 
frank young face grew red, and he said, bluntly, 

" Wear it in the face of that man there ? Wear 
72 



WAITING FOR THE WAR ZONE 

it, when I Ve seen French soldiers who had given 
their lives or their best blood and never had a 
medal ! Wear it, when I 've walked down the 
Champs Elysees beside a hero with both eyes and 
both hands gone. I — I 'd be ashamed." 

" That 's the right sort of spirit," I heard an 
American behind me say. u There are too many 
Americans in Paris, secretly hoping for a decora- 
tion, or else openly working for it. When we 're 
saving our skins, and letting the Allies do our 
bit, we ought to give all we can and ask for noth- 
ing. There are too many girls who come over 
here to help France, and who expect to go joy- 
riding through the war zone." 

That remark rankled. The Americans I had 
seen, with perhaps one or two exceptions, had 
struck me as disinterested people. There were 
the women in the American Fund for French 
Wounded, who had all made sacrifices to give their 
services to France: Mrs. Benjamin Lathrop, Miss 
Perkins, Miss Vail, Mrs. Wilson, Miss D'Este; 
many others. There was Doctor Watson, rector 
of the American church, and his wife, who worked 
early and late for the poor of Paris and of the 
devastated region, with no thought of self. There 
was Caroline Levy, so used to physical comfort, 
who for months had got up at six to do menial 
work in a hospital, and who had taken her seven- 
teen-year-old boy out of college to drive an 
ambulance, both of them offering inconspicuous 
unremitting service. There were workers in 

73 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

ouvroirs whose subordinate positions would pre- 
clude any chance of decorations, who could not 
possibly have anything to gain. Surely our service 
was for the most part unmarred by egotism ! 

I hoped the French people thought we were dis- 
interested. On all sides I heard grateful remarks 
about America from French soldiers and civilians. 
All along I had felt that we Americans should be 
in the war with more than our money. I won- 
dered what the French really thought of us and 
our attitude. I knew what the English thought. 
I had begun to find it out one night in London in 
a music hall, when from the stage had come some 
reference to the United States, and from the gal- 
lery had come a sneering, jeering chorus, 

"Too proud to fight!" 

I had felt, on the part of my British friends, an 
attitude something like this: "We don't think 
you 're very important as a military force. 
Really, we don't need you or want you, — but 
why don't you come in? " 

And finally I had the average British soldier's 
attitude put to me by a young Canadian officer as 
follows : 

" The United States seems to think this war 
is a private European war with which they have 
nothing to do. They have not assumed that the 
cause of the Allies is the cause of civilization. 
They have not granted that the ultimate defeat of 
the Allies would prove injurious to themselves. 
They object to the English regulation which in- 

74 



WAITING FOR THE WAR ZONE 

conveniences their commerce, — almost seeming 
to look at this in the same light as at Germany's 
outrageous disregard of international law. Yet 
they rake in money for the high-priced munitions 
they sell us, — often of poor quality, as I have 
reason to know. A 'Yank' shell, exploding be- 
fore its time, has killed men fairly at my feet. 
We resent it that your country is * too proud to 
fight,' because that means that we have to fight 
for her." 

I wanted very much to know what the French 
really thought of us, and in the days while I was 
waiting to go to the war zone I tried to find out. 
I 'm not sure that I ever really did. But the near- 
est I came to it was in a talk I had one day at 
Le Bourget with Jules Mercier. Le Bourget, 
some fifteen miles outside Paris, is a place where 
soldiers entrain for the front. At one end of the 
long, long platform is a little canteen where an 
American girl, once a schoolteacher, gives the sol- 
diers hot coffee and hot soup. Nor do her minis- 
trations end there. I have seen her stop a limp- 
ing soldier, take off his sock and find that his foot 
was infected. There was no superior officer pres- 
ent who could give him permission to go to the 
hospital outside Le Bourget, and she dressed the 
foot herself, her lips quivering. I have seen her 
talking to men of their homes, of their children, 
of the little farms where they were reared. She 
never failed to give comfort, — and she never 
failed to take away another scar for her own ten- 

75 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

der heart. Just an inconspicuous woman, but 
there are hundreds of the men who have streamed 
down the long platform of Le Bourget who have 
risen up to call her blessed. 

On the Sunday I met Jules Mercier I went with 
two officials of the American Fund for French 
Wounded to give cigarettes to the soldiers. Such 
a joy it is to offer good American tobacco to the 
French soldiers. The poilu's eyes glisten as he 
looks at the extended box; but he takes only one 
cigarette. You have to press several upon him; 
never have I known a French soldier to give way 
to his real desires in the matter of our tobacco. 
Down the long platform they surged in billows 
of horizon-blue for the French soldiers, of red for 
the Turcos and of mustard-brown for the Moroc- 
cans and Tunisians. A gay billowing it was, and 
sweeping along on the crest of a wave of horizon- 
blue was little Jules Mercier. 

I am certain I never met Jules before, though 
he is " almost certain, — but, yes, madame, quite 
certain " that he saw me once in the restaurant 
near Fifth Avenue, up in the Forties, where he 
used to be a waiter. Jules had gone to America 
at fourteen; had prospered, financially, but had 
met with a misadventure in love at about the time 
the war broke out. The land of his birth, a sense 
of adventure, and a wish to lose sight of his per- 
sonal disappointment — all had conspired to call 
him back to France. 

Jules and I walked up and down the long plat- 
76 



WAITING FOR THE WAR ZONE 

form, and talked and became friends. I ventured 
to ask him about the girl who had jilted him in 
New York. He thumped his narrow chest. 

" Here," he said, " it is here I have her letter 
that she wrote when she found I was in the 
trenches. All full of endearments it is. I am her 
brave soldier! Heh! She will have a light in 
the window for me when I return! Heh! She 
lives up in the Broneex, and me, I think an electric 
bulb in the window there for me will be foony. 
She wants my picture, yes, to put a flower before ! " 

Jules thumped the letter again, and added, 
reflectively, 

" I do not think my wife would like me to carry 
that letter if she knew. But I carry it out of 
scorn, yes ! " 

" Oh," I gasped, " so you are married? " 

" Ah, but yes ! the nicest little wife, the nicest 
little baby, too. She 's fit to be a soldier's wife, 
this one. Not like the other, no. She is French- 
American, too; she thought the United States 
ought to help in this war, and when it did n't she 
came herself. Ah, yes, she could not be a soldier, 
but she could work in the munitions. She could 
give the work of one soldier." 

Jules showed me the picture of his wife and 
baby. Then I said, 

"Tell me, Jules, what do the French really 
think of us?" 

The inscrutable expression with which I was 
already familiar veiled Jules's eyes, and he began 

77 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

to speak words of graceful gratitude with which 
I was also familiar. But after a time I convinced 
Jules that he could be frank. 

" I will tell you a little incident that happened 
the other day, madame, in a little town back of 
the line where I was billeted. I had occasion to 
seek my lieutenant in a brasserie. He sat there 
with a British officer. Yes. As I stand, and they 
sit, an ambulance passes the window. It is the 
gift of a very rich lady in New York. On the side 
of the ambulance is painted in big letters that it 
is her gift. And my lieutenant says to the British 
officer, 

" ' That 's America.' 

" And the British officer answers, 

" ' That 's America, advertising; saying, * Look 
at me!"' 

" So, madame, perhaps the French think the 
Americans point to themselves very much. And 
I know that the soldiers in the trenches wonder at 
the United States. They are grateful for the 
gifts of the ladies. They bless the ambulance 
that takes them hastily to the hospital. But they 
say to me, 

" ' Jules, you have lived there. You tell us. 
Why do not the Americans come to fight ? We are 
fighting for principles that they understand. We 
gave them help ! ' 

" What am I to say, madame? It is of no use 
to remind my friends that those French soldiers 
of the Revolutionary War were paid, were, in a 

78 



WAITING FOR THE WAR ZONE 

sense, mercenaries. Madame knows that money 
never pays the soldier or his family for the life he 
gives. I have no explanation for my friends. 

" When an American comes to drive an ambu- 
lance our soldiers look at him and wonder why he 
is not in the trenches. When an American enlists 
in the foreign legion, to him in our hearts we say 
■ brother ' and we would give our lives to save his. 

" Does madame understand? France is grate- 
ful, — but proud. She will ask for no more than 
she receives. She would be glad to need nothing. 
And so it is wise for the Americans to give tact- 
fully, not to wish to manage for France in the 
brisk American fashion. It is better, perhaps, for 
France to manage in her own way, — even to 
make her mistakes in her own way, as America 
does. 

" But there is a little feeling, — it is the feeling 
that we soldiers have for our rich civilians. We 
see them driving in their fine motor cars that 
splash the mud on our uniforms that we have 
cleaned so carefully to look neat on our ' per- 
missions.'' We scowl at them and wonder if they 
have made their profits through the war, and if 
they have sons at the front or if their sons are 
slackers, embusques. But if we find out after- 
wards that their sons are not in safe service, but 
are in the trenches, then again we say in our hearts 
1 Brother.' So we shall feel when the Americans 
are in the war. Any misunderstanding will have 
gone. We shall love them as we do the British. 
Does madame understand?" 

79 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

I thought I did, and I strove very hard to re- 
assure Jules, who had suddenly repented his 
frankness, was fearful he had not been quite " gen- 
til" But presently he was telling me about the 
little home in Barcy, near Meaux, where his wife 
and child live with her mother, and he was whis- 
pering that he had been all over the battlefield 
of the Marne, which is to be reached from Meaux, 
and that he did not regard that battle as so difficult 
as his own experiences upon the Somme. 

The groups on the platform grew thinner. By 
twos and threes the soldiers had gone into the 
third-class carriages. I bade Jules good-bye, told 
him that before we met again the United States 
would be in the war. More cigarettes to the men 
and little gay flags, which they took, laughing. 
The train began to move. The brave fellows 
leaned from the windows, cheering, waving. Here 
and there a man sat, immobile, his face blank, his 
eyes glazed. Perhaps he saw the home he had 
just left; or perhaps he was looking ahead to that 
future of the trenches which he knew so well, 
which might be his. last sight in this world. 

The train moved more quickly. The men hung 
out of the windows; some of them cried " Vive 
VAmerique! " Others began to sing the Mar- 
seillaise. We Americans waved, and cried " Vive 
la France" " Bon chance" " Au 'voir" Our 
tears made their figures turn into a swimming blue 
cloud, growing more and more dim as the train 
quickened its speed. 

80 



WAITING FOR THE WAR ZONE 

Somehow, as we drove back through the gray- 
streets of Paris, I was content to wait for the war 
zone as long as the French authorities desired. 
What did it matter if they furnished me with hope 
that could never be fulfilled? What if no Ameri- 
can writers ever saw the trenches ! Those thou- 
sands of men in blue that massed themselves up 
into a living wall of flesh and blood against the 
Germans would somehow be translated into 
knowledge for the world if nobody ever wrote 
a line. 

" Vive la France" we who love her are always 
saying in our hearts. She would live without her 
friends, and she will live in spite of her enemies. 



81 



CHAPTER VI 
The First Stretch of the War Zone 

So the days of waiting went on. One night 
when Eleanor came back from her hospital, 
rather pale because of what she had seen that day 
of bravery and pain, I showed her triumphantly 
a permit. 

" For Soissons ! " I said. 

" Not Soissons ! " she cried. " It 's bombarded 
daily. It 's full of spies. It 's bound to be the 
centre of a big attack soon. The cavalry have 
gone there — " 

" Nevertheless/' I said, triumphantly, " I 've 
just come from the Maison de la Presse, where 
they summoned me to give me this permit. I met 
the officer who is to conduct us. He *s the only 
Frenchman with imperfect manners I have ever 
seen. He showed that he didn't want us, and 
did n't see why we were allowed to go to Soissons. 
To-morrow morning we depart. Think of it! 
Soissons ! " 

Throughout dinner I glowed. I could see that 
wide road to Soissons along which we should 
drive ! I could see the cavalry, — not as they are 
now, just men in blue, acting as infantry in the 
trenches, running down sometimes to exercise 
their horses which are kept two miles behind 

82 



FIRST STRETCH OF WAR ZONE 

the lines. Rather, I saw them as they were 
when they first rode out from Paris in August, 
1 9 14, in the moonlight. Magnificent riders, 
in their red uniforms and white mantles, their 
sabres flashing, their golden helmets gleaming, 
the long tails of horse hair which hung from 
them swinging wide as the horses galloped. That 
was the way they rode when France knew the 
glory of war, — but not yet this long grinding 
pressure. 

" I can't believe it! " Eleanor kept murmuring. 

It was just as well she did not, because at ten 
o'clock, after I had been warning the night watch- 
man to be sure to call me in time, I had a regretful 
telegram advising me that the trip to Soissons 
had been indefinitely postponed. It was post- 
poned so far that I have not yet gone ! For me it 
may be a case of " I never shall see Carcasson." 

I knew, and I was to know, further, that plans 
to go to the war zone must be subject to instant 
change. More than once I was promised trips 
to Verdun, to Soissons, to Compiegne, to Nancy, to 
Alsace, to Lorraine, and then the plans would be 
cancelled or changed. It was my good fortune to 
go, and to go repeatedly to the war zone, but I 
never felt sure I had really started until my train 
was well out of the Gare du Nord. Even then 
I knew that it was always possible to be turned 
back if a bombardment were assailing the city or 
the trenches for which I was bound. There came, 
however, an early morning when I drove through 

83 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

the night-blue canyons of the Paris streets; saw 
the crepuscular blue dawn of the Gare du Nord, 
lighted by the countless crimson stars which were 
the glowing cigarettes of the soldiers, bought my 
ticket and boarded a train crowded with officers 
going back to the front. From my window I could 
see one of them pacing up and down the platform, 
his wife at his side. The wives of the private 
soldiers are not allowed on the platform. They 
wait in the station outside, until a brave cheering 
and whistling warns them that their men have 
once more gone out to face the unknown. 

We travelled many miles before we reached the 
war zone proper. Yet signs of the business of 
war met us almost immediately. A little beyond 
the city, and one can see proofs that no matter 
what bad luck the French may have in war it will 
take the Germans a long time to get to Paris. 
Preparations for defence are not visible about the 
city itself; the city gates, once barricaded, are now 
open for traffic at any hour; the barbed-wire en- 
tanglements and the trenches across the roadway 
have been removed. But such defences have only 
withdrawn a little way. In whatever direction 
from the city one travels, one sees lines of stakes 
running across the fields, and between these are 
wound countless strands of barbed wire. Flanking 
these are deep, narrow trenches. Circle after 
circle of such defences spell to the possible in- 
vader a determined contest for every foot of the 
soil near Paris. 

84 



FIRST STRETCH OF WAR ZONE 

Signs of war everywhere : sentries on guard at 
bridges, soldiers getting in or out every time our 
train stopped. Other trains went with us, — 
freight cars on which the fate of France depends, 
each marked for eight horses or forty men, always 
carrying soldiers only. Invariably these were 
grouped in the wide doors, placed as if for a pho- 
tograph, but without the self-consciousness of 
people sitting before a camera. They were too 
much interested in us, as a break in the monotony 
of their lives, and they gazed at us intently and 
amiably. Sometimes they wore horizon-blue; 
sometimes the mustard-colored uniforms of the 
Colonials from Tunis or Morocco. Sometimes 
a melancholy Arabian face would gaze down at 
us; again a knot of black, big, smiling Cingalese. 

Other freight cars went by loaded with en- 
trenching tools, with stakes and logs for trench 
repairing, with kitchens, and occasionally with the 
little two- and four-wheeled carts used in certain 
sectors for carrying the wounded from the first 
dressing station to the ambulances. Once we 
stopped beside a train flanked by two engines, its 
duty to carry up to the front three of the largest 
size cannon. They were painted with the usual 
camouflage in green and brown. 

And yet, for all these symbols of the business 
of war, there was a sort of inalienable look of 
peace over the valley of the Marne. Women or 
men were ploughing; fields, which were untilled 
for lack of labor, looked at rest rather than 

85 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

neglected. Flocks of crows made black blots 
against the brown earth as they garnered their 
harvest. High up in the air were two silver aero- 
planes, looking no larger nor more dangerous than 
their little brothers, the crows. On the low hills 
lay narrow strips of crops, lovely in their softness 
and color. There is an unmistakably " foreign " 
look to an American about those gracious hills of 
the Marne. Perhaps it comes from the economy 
of trees, perhaps from a certain soft indecision 
of color. Here and there, at their feet, were little 
clean villages with brownish-red roofs. They 
seemed so placid that it was impossible to believe 
that the Germans had marched through them, had 
left scars upon them. Somewhere, in the back- 
ground over yonder lived the Lecontiers, — or 
did they? — the Lecontiers who had become for 
me the symbol of all the suffering people of 
France. All that grief in the background, and, 
on the surface, serenity. There would be a sud- 
den flashing view of a white villa with a green 
garden, down which ran a laughing child; of a 
stream in which a man and boy were fishing. 

I was being " personally conducted " by an 
official of the Maison de la Presse, Madame St. 
Marie Perrin, to several of the base hospitals. 
This meant seeing soldiers so freshly come from 
trenches that in their ears were still the sounds of 
the attack, before their eyes blasting sights. They 
can give the civilian a feeling about warfare that 
the soldier in Paris or in England cannot. For, 

86 



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An open-air school for French war-orphans 



FIRST STRETCH OF WAR ZONE 

mercifully, the farther the soldier travels from 
the trenches, the dimmer are the pictures in his 
mind. If he could not forget out of the trenches, 
and if he could not dull himself in the trenches, 
he could not go on fighting. Even in the base hos- 
pital he voluntarily and energetically begins to 
forget, giving himself up to his clean white bed, 
ministered to by women who tend him like a child, 
but worship him as a hero. Even a man in civil 
life would know that that is an ideal combination. 

A base hospital is by no means a sad sight. The 
men do not look sick. Indeed, they are not sick, 
they are wounded. And often they are glad to be 
wounded. Their eyes show it, — and they show 
more than that. The eyes of the French wounded 
may be infinitely weary, or dulled with pain, but 
in their depths is always a glint of spiritual light. 
Even very young boys have it; perhaps it is be- 
cause, ever since the seventies, France has known 
that she must fight again for her life, and every 
man-child has been born, it may be, with a sub- 
conscious willingness to pay his country's price. 
Perhaps it is because there is something purifying 
in having paid blood and pain for a cause outside 
oneself. Perhaps it is because France, the martyr, 
has found herself as never before, and each of 
her men has won some dower of the soul. 

Sometimes when the tortured nerves are quiet, 
and pain has given place to something higher, the 
spiritual gleam glows, and on the soldier's face 
is a light like a prayer. Only sometimes, — for 

87 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

even France cannot be forever on a high level ; — 
the flooding light dies down to a glint again. 
Idealization goes, and the soldier is just a suffer- 
ing body, getting healed to go back to the front 
to be wounded once more. But the glint is there ; 
it is symbolic of the self-sacrifice of France, and 
while it endures France cannot die. 

It was a hospital in Epernay that we visited 
first. The neat office of the head doctor, a polite 
French welcome, many stairs to climb, and then 
entrance into our first ward. A long, long ward 
it was, with beds along two sides of the wall, most 
of them occupied. Above each man's bed was 
pinned his medals, if he had any, and pictures of 
his wife and children, or his mother or fiancee. On 
or beside the unoccupied beds sat men in the dark 
blue uniform of the convalescent. 

As we entered, those men rose, stood to atten- 
tion and saluted. And my blood boiled, be- 
cause all the time we were in the ward they 
stood. That they must always do when a 
doctor enters. And why? Surely they have 
earned the right, have bought it with their blood, 
to sit in convalescence, or lounge in the pres- 
ence of a doctor who, whatever his devotion, 
has not had to give his own blood for France. 
The doctors who have been selected for the dan- 
gerous positions in the trenches work furiously, 
after attacks and bombardments, and nobody 
stops to salute them. 

There was a hospital I used often to visit in 



FIRST STRETCH OF WAR ZONE 

Lewisham, because of the many English soldiers 
I knew in a certain ward who had been wounded 
on the Somme. The head nurse or sister of the 
ward was one of the best women I have ever 
known. If she had a fault I never saw it. She 
was the perfection of self-sacrifice and devotion. 
And yet she would begin to wake her soldiers as 
early as four o'clock in the morning to wash their 
faces and comb their hair, so that they could show 
the respect of perfect cleanliness to the doctor 
when he arrived in the neighborhood of nine 
o'clock. When they went over the top to help 
save the skin of the doctors safe in England they 
did n't stop to wash their faces ! 

The sick French soldiers in the ward went on 
standing, and my blood went on boiling. We 
walked down between the rows of beds. Each 
one had a clean white cover hanging down over 
the foot-board of the bed. Why, I have never 
learned. I would rather have seen " aeroplanes," 
as the soldiers call the supports on which rest 
wounded arms and legs. But the covers did add 
an effect of spotlessness to the already clean ward. 
Perhaps it was a typical Gallic touch. 

And then I saw Pierre, lying very still and 
smiling, true soldier of France that he was. Once 
he must have been a very handsome man; now he 
was a mutile: one eye gone, one leg and one arm. 
Over his bed, beside the pictures of a stout, smil- 
ing woman and three little boys, hung two medals, 
his croix de guerre and his military medal. I had 

89 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

already learned that it is a rare soldier who cares 
to tell what form his bravery took. But the nurse 
told me that he had got the croix de guerre for 
carrying under fire much-needed ammunition; of 
a party of ten he alone had lived. The military 
medal was for his mutilations, suffered after he 
had led a bombing party into a German trench. 

But if Pierre would not talk of his deeds he was 
eager to talk of the home to which he was soon to 
return. 

" As madame sees," he said, " I am cracked. 
But I have saved something of myself to take back 
to my little children." 

He told me their names and ages, and described 
the farm where they lived, and which he and his 
three brothers had tilled. I asked how it had 
fared with his brothers. It is the kind of question 
one asks without hope. 

" One was killed on the Marne, madame; one 
is missing at Verdun; one lost his eyes and his right 
arm at the Somme." Then he added, almost as 
if he were offering comfort, 

" I can give the three of them back to France 
through my three little boys." 

The White Flame of France ! 

I moved away. I had to find quickly something 
I could smile at. I think Pierre understood this, 
because he turned to a man in the next bed and 
said, 

" Eh, old embus que, here you are at your old 
cowardly tricks ! " 

90 



FIRST STRETCH OF WAR ZONE 

The man on the next bed had been carried, 
just an hour before, out of " Pictures." Doubt- 
less " pictures " is not a fair translation of what 
the French soldiers call their operating theatre. 
The English call it " Pictures " because of what 
the soldier sees and hears as he is going under 
ether. The word is just one more sign of the 
brave way soldiers accept physical pain. The 
poilu to whom Pierre spoke had forty wounds 
from shrapnel. The doctors, through operation 
after operation, were trying to make his flesh 
sound again. 

The " embus que " smiled faintly, as one who 
has received a compliment, and I tried to smile 
too. " Embusque" or slacker, may be the most 
insulting or the most complimentary word in the 
language. When one soldier says it to another 
who has been hurt it is a term of endearment. 
The speaker does n't even have to smile as he says 
it. But far away from hospitals and trenches it 
is the deadliest sort of offence. " Cochon " I be- 
lieve used to be the forbidden word; but to call 
a man a pig as against calling him an embusque 
would be to praise him. 

The guests of the first hotel at which Eleanor 
and I stayed in Paris had a concrete instance of 
that. One night the late diners heard a shrieking 
clamor in the kitchen. There was a rush for the 
door. Perhaps it might be a spy who should be 
taken ! There in the midst of the kitchen the chef 
and the head waiter were fighting with knives, 

9i 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

their blood dripping over the already soiled floor. 
The head waiter had called the chef an embusque, 
and as the chef had been rejected by the military 
authorities because of his physical disabilities, he 
was avenging his honor in the head waiter's gore. 

The weak soldier, then, smiled as if Pierre had 
praised him, and I tried to smile, but I was not 
really amused until my eye fell on Georges. 
There he lay, bald and middle-aged, — and twirl- 
ing his moustache with intensity and with inten- 
tion. Then I remembered what I had learned in 
my surreptitious childhood reading of fiction, that 
when the lady-killer entered he always twirled his 
moustaches. It was as sure a sign as that the 
blondness of the heroine was virtue, the darkness 
of the adventuress was wickedness, and that the 
handsome face and poverty of the hero meant 
he 'd get, in the last chapter, everything there was 
to have. 

Georges twirled and twirled and grew more and 
more ridiculous. He was too absurd in his role of 
lady-killer, so obviously cast in the wrong part. 
It was n't because he was bald; I rather like bald 
men; I never knew one who wasn't attractive. 
His fatness didn't matter; I like fat people. It 
was perhaps because he was naive and bald and 
fat and too eager. He had the effect of a plump, 
simple, little boy, playing at a grown-up game he 
did n't understand, but thought very masculine and 
a bit naughty. 

Of course we rallied about the bed of Georges, 
92 



FIRST STRETCH OF WAR ZONE 

and praised him and petted him and admired the 
garish rings he wore. He had made them him- 
self out of the aluminum from the nose of the 
German shell that had wounded him. In each was 
a bit of the glass which had fallen from the stained 
great window of the cathedral of Rheims. Four 
of them, all small ones, fitting on his little fingers, 
had the glass set in a heart shape. 

" Those," said Georges, " are for my fiancees. 
Until I have made up my mind, I shall not show 
one more consideration than I do another. That 
is fair, is it not, madame? " 

That was a hard question for a feminist to an- 
swer, but Georges did not want an answer. 

" One of them is in the invaded district. That 
finishes her for me. No girl for me who has lived 
in the same town with Germans. But I should 
like her to have the ring for sentiment. The other 
three, — but I do not know. One of them gets 
good wages in a munition factory. Another, — 
my faith ! — she is getting rich because she has a 
little grocery shop in a village where English 
soldiers are billeted. But she is not so amiable as 
the first. The third, if her brother should be 
killed in the war, she will have all to herself a 
good farm. Madame sees the difficulties." 

" Ah, but a soldier like you," madame said, 
" should not have much difficulty in being true to 
all three, — especially at long range in a hospital." 

Georges took this as a compliment. 

" True, madame," he beamed, " and then there 
93 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

is always the chance of meeting someone else. I 
can always make another ring. Time settles these 
things for the soldier." 

Every soldier we saw was worth lingering with : 
the tall Arab in his white burnoose, who feared 
the cold and longed to go home; the little seven- 
teen-year-old boy who, too young to be called, 
had enlisted. He had the Cross of War for hav- 
ing held, with bombs, a bit of trench against 
twenty advancing Germans. He had killed them 
all, — that little boy who looked young enough 
still to be tubbed by his mother on Saturday 
nights. There was the group of handsome offi- 
cers at lunch in their private dining room. Gentles 
and simples, they were all soldiers who bore scars 
for France. 

On that three days' tour we saw many hospitals ; 
there was the field ambulance at St. Menehould, 
put temporarily in a moving-picture palace. It 
had wounded men and tubercular men. The rule 
was that the windows of the wards must be kept 
open because of the tubercular men. So the 
wounded men in bed shivered under a keen wind, 
while down stairs in the sealed-up reception rooms, 
the tubercular men huddled about stoves entirely 
free from any current of air. About the only 
thing French soldiers seem afraid of is fresh air 
in a sleeping or living room. We had an impres- 
sion of gloom at St. Menehould, perhaps because 
of the great shells that, just before our arrival, 
had rained down on the part of the town near the 

94 



FIRST STRETCH OF WAR ZONE 

railway; perhaps because of the sound of the 
German guns, for St. Menehould is not many 
miles from the German lines. 

There were the hospitals at Chalons, at Re- 
vigny, at Compiegne, and at Bar-le-Duc. The one 
at Bar-le-Duc is the largest. It lies opposite the 
railway station, and a train is ready to take the 
patients away in case of bombardment The effect 
of the hospital is impressive : a large central 
building, and on each side many long shed-like 
buildings, always filled with patients. When we 
entered the great yard, a number of soldiers were 
being mustered out of the hospital by an officer. 
He would call a name ; a soldier would reply, and 
with that reply he was free to go. Free to go 
home, to finish his convalescence with those who 
loved him. To these men we said " Bon chance " 
with joy, and they answered us with joy. It made 
the spirit soar to see their happiness. I suppose 
they would not know another moment so happy, 
except when each opened the door of his own 
house. 

We visited the long wooden structures. Here 
were wounded men and sick men : ill with typhoid 
fever, with jaundice, with tuberculosis, with rheu- 
matism, with any ills that may make a soldier 
unfit to protect France in the trenches. 

One soldier, crippled with rheumatism, to whom 
I talked, had a curious manner of finality in his 
replies, as if he expected me to pass on and leave 
him in peace. So I asked him if I were tiring him. 
His lips curved in a sad, half cynical smile. 

95 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

" But, no," he said; " I supposed that I could 
not interest madame, that she would pass on 
quickly, as other visitors do who are not relatives. 
You see, madame, there is nothing romantic about 
me. I have no wound! " 

An English soldier I had met had talked in 
much the same fashion. 

" A pretty girl of the ' smooth-the-sick-brow ' 
type," he had said, " won't look at you if you have 
taken pneumonia or rheumatism. If you 've only 
got a bullet in you she '11 tolerate you, but she 
won't really accept you unless you are riddled with 
shell." 

" We were ready to take wounds," the French 
soldier resumed. " We suffered, we malades, the 
bombardments, the misery of cold and suspense, 
we went through the attacks. We gave all we had 
to France. It was only chance that spared me the 
wound. I wish it had not. For with a wound 
I would have had a pension. Now I shall have 
no pension, and always I shall be a cripple." 

It is true. France does not give her " malades " 
a pension; nor even the mutilated men, unless they 
are totally incapacitated. More than that, after 
six months these soldiers, released from military 
service, must yield up their uniforms. There are 
private organizations which try to teach them 
trades, or to find them work in keeping with their 
depleted abilities. Even so, the price these men 
have paid to France is heavy. One of the saddest 
sights I saw in Paris was a sort of lottery of old 

96 



FIRST STRETCH OF WAR ZONE 

clothes, where these reforme soldiers paid a franc 
each, and drew something in the way of garments. 
There they stood in line, poor, thin, ill-clad 
heroes, and if they found their prizes were not 
what they wanted, they looked about eagerly for 
someone who might be willing to exchange. 

It was at Bar-le-Duc that I first talked with the 
Cingalese soldiers. There must have been fifty 
of them in the ward, — big, black, beaming crea- 
tures, mostly sitting on their beds or leaning 
against the walls, looking at us with friendly, 
curious eyes. One of them held the Cingalese 
flag, — red, with a green hand in the centre. 
Their nurse, a pretty blonde woman, spoke of 
them in terms of deepest affection. 

" I 'd rather nurse them than any other sol- 
diers," she said; "they are so docile, so good about 
obeying rules, so affectionate. They call me 
' Mama ' or else t Mama Cingalese.' I love 
them." 

This sorted ill with the stories I had heard from 
French officers about the Cingalese. But as I 
looked at them they did appear gentle. I believed 
her and not the officers. I spoke to one of them, 
— a big, ugly creature, sitting cross-legged on the 
bed, grinning, looking like an amiable ape. 

" It is n't possible that you have killed Ger- 
mans? " I said to him. 

He bounded on the floor, his face like a devil's. 
He seized a broom, and he made me see with 
dreadful realistic motions how he cut off the heads 

97 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

of the Germans. I have never seen on a stage 
anything more vivid. 

" When they say ' Kamerad ' to me," he yelled, 
" I say * No Kamerad,' and I thrust them through 
the middle, and put my foot on them to drag out 
my bayonet." 

Then he crawled on his bed, once more an 
amiable ape. Thereafter I was constrained to 
believe both the officers and the nurses. The offi- 
cers say that the Cingalese cannot endure a bom- 
bardment; therefore, they are not taken into the 
trenches until a few hours before an attack. For 
the attack they are put in the front line, and they 
go bounding over No Man's Land, their bayo- 
nets fixed, shouting. Sometimes, though against 
orders, they carry an open knife in their teeth. 
They terrify the Germans. They embarrass their 
officers, for they go beyond the territory marked 
out for the advance, and they can't stop when the 
fighting is done. 

When I repeated this to the nurse she nodded. 

" I '11 have to confess," she said, " that my first 
encounter with the Cingalese was horrifying. I 
had charge of a tiny ward containing two wounded 
Cingalese and two wounded Germans. I had 
orders not to leave the ward, but during the night 
some serious emergency occurred in the adjoining 
ward, and I was called to help. When I returned 
I found that one of my wounded Cingalese had 
crawled out of bed and killed the two Germans." 

Logical people, the Cingalese. To them an 
98 



FIRST STRETCH OF WAR ZONE 

enemy is an enemy, and they don't understand 
when the game changes. 

Of all the hospitals I saw I liked best that of 
Doctor and Mrs. Alexis Carrel at Compiegne 
and that of Mrs. Julia Depew at the Chateau 
dAnnel. For one thing, I was not personally 
conducted when I saw them. I had the almost 
unheard-of privilege, for a writer, of wandering 
by myself in that particular region of the Aisne. 
A writer naturally does not want to travel by rule ; 
frequently it is n't in the wide roads marked out 
for him, but in the by-paths of his own discovering 
that he finds the highest significance. The work 
of Doctor Carrel is well known in America; his 
use of Dakin's solution for washing out the 
wounds every two hours and his mathematical 
prophecies of his cures have often been written 
about in our periodicals. What he has done for 
head wounds and for fractures is invaluable. His 
hospital, until the latest push, was so close to the 
lines that he often received soldiers two hours 
after they were wounded. In such cases his cures 
were prompt. Hundreds of soldiers owe their 
limbs or their lives to his work and that of his 
wife. The United States may be proud of the 
help it has been able to give France through this 
hospital, and also through that of Mrs. Depew. 

Hers is not so well known. It was even nearer 
the German lines than the Carrel hospital. I real- 
ized that when I followed Mrs. Depew from ward 
to ward with a gas mask over my arm. There 

99 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

is something about the serene white-winged 
Chateau dAnnel rising from its deep green back- 
ground that touches the imagination. A beautiful 
home it was, surrounded by some seven hundred 
acres of land, set in the midst of hunting country; 
a place for pleasure, for leisure. Now it is a 
house of suffering and of mercy. Magnificent 
music-room and ball-room, library and reception 
rooms, — all are turned into wards. On the wide 
lawn are built wooden barracks for more beds; in 
a far corner of the garden is a soldier's graveyard 
with one hundred crosses, and beyond are trenches, 
dug in case Annel should ever again be attacked 
by the Germans. Most characteristic fact of all : 
from the beginning the American flag has flown 
there, on this nearest of all private hospitals to 
the trenches. Time and again the German Taubes 
have passed over it, have seen that flag and the 
Red Cross emblem, and have not shelled it. The 
chateau was captured, but a German officer who 
knew Mrs. Depew's uncle, Senator Depew, pro- 
tected it. While they had it, three English sol- 
diers, wounded in the retreat from Mons, crawled 
in and were secretly cared for by the old con- 
cierge. They were there when the Germans with- 
drew and when Mrs. Depew and her staff came 
back. As I went through ward after ward I built 
up the story of Annel. Mrs. Depew organized 
the hospital herself, established an office at the 
Hotel Creon in Paris, where supplies could be sent 
her by friends, and so far has furnished practi- 

ioo 



FIRST STRETCH OF WAR ZONE 

cally all the money herself. She organized the 
diet kitchen; supervised it; when necessary she 
cooked and nursed herself; on one occasion she 
decorated some soldiers with the Cross of War, 
when the officers who were to do it were called 
suddenly to the front. She told me, with tears, 
of a man she was to have decorated, but the officer 
came back in time. The man was dying. He had 
strength only to touch his officer's hand and say, 

" Thank you, my captain. I have done my best. 
Au 'voir. Vive la France! " 

They die as gallantly as they charge, these sol- 
diers of France. There was no hospital I visited 
on that tour, or later, that did not serve as a 
human monument to bravery and patience. Des- 
pite the suffering and the percentage of men whom 
no care of nurses and doctors can save, the hos- 
pitals teach one to hope. As I left Annel that 
evening I met soldiers marching up to the trenches, 
and it was good to know that, if they must be cast 
into the red gulf of war and suffer wounds, at 
least soft, clean beds would receive them, and they 
would be nursed by tender women who would not 
think of them as " casualties " nor in terms of sta- 
tistics, but as broken men, whom other women 
had borne with pain, and who must be reborn 
again for their most ancient mother, France. 



101 



CHAPTER VII 

The Wide Plantations of the Dead 

The sound of the guns was in my ears that 
morning. A bombardment is a curious ac- 
companiment to a civilian's daily living. Some- 
times it is so far away that it affects one subcon- 
sciously, like a paper crackling at midnight when 
one is half asleep. Again, it may thrust itself in 
the foreground of one's experience menacingly. 
A bombardment that I shall never forget I saw 
and heard in Compiegne. I had spent the morn- 
ing far away from all signs of war, walking in the 
wonderful forest of Compiegne, than which there 
is no more beautiful wood in the world. I had a 
sense of rich peace. When I reached the chateau 
where Napoleon brought his second wife, Marie 
Louise, I felt quite like a pre-war tourist as I wan- 
dered through the spacious grounds looking at 
the statues of lovely, mild ladies, reflective or 
defiant men and fierce lions. On the door the 
emperor had his initial carved on three stone 
panels, — which is perhaps what an upstart con- 
queror would do. In front of the chateau is a 
great vista between the trees of the park. Napo- 
leon is said to have had it cut over night to 
please Marie Louise, which is what a lover would 
do, — or a politic emperor. 

1 02 



PLANTATIONS OF THE DEAD 

While I was looking at all these signs of power 
and glory I heard the shattering report of a gun. 
First came a deep double " woof " ; then a sharp 
echo; then a long sighing sound. People in the 
square opposite the chateau paused and glanced 
in the direction of a hill some quarter of a mile 
away. Ten minutes later I was on the roof of my 
hotel, looking across the valley at that hill. Upon 
it would come, one after another, long tongues of 
yellow flame, and then the deep barking of the 
guns. They were of different calibre, judging 
from the sounds, but they were all loud, and all 
nerve-racking. 

The bombardment was directed against the 
town of Roye. For three hours it continued. I 
am not a screaming person, but after fifteen min- 
utes of that bombardment I could understand why 
people want to scream. I thought of those poor 
French civilians in Roye, cowering in their cellars, 
bombarded, of necessity, by the shells from their 
own friends. I did not wonder at stories I had 
heard of soldiers who, under bombardment, run 
up and down the trenches, striking their heads 
against the walls. What a test for nerves! To 
lie, perhaps as closely crowded together as lead 
soldiers in a box, wondering how much longer the 
shelling will last, and when the attack will come ! 
Surely nature allows a merciful insensibility, takes 
away fear, makes the soldier face the stark fact 
of shells with passive stoicism. 

Again and again in the war zone, as I saw what 
103 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

the soldiers endured, I felt a passionate admira- 
tion for common men. Many of them are with- 
out especial education or high ideals; just average 
people who want to stay at home. They have 
proved what nobility there is in human nature. 
In spite of the insanity and waste of the war, the 
men of all countries who die so grandly surely 
give the world the right to hope that after this 
war civilization will be a better thing than ever it 
was before; that on the broken lives of the sol- 
diers and of their women and children we can 
build up a new and a better world for all the 
peoples. 

But the sound of the guns as they came to me 
that morning when I first saw the battlefield of the 
Marne were so remote that they seemed only like 
the subdued and meaningless mutterings of thun- 
der. I was at the Urgency Cases Hospital at 
Faux Miroir, some four miles from Verdun, 
staffed by English doctors, nurses and orderlies, 
for French soldiers who come mostly from Ver- 
dun, the Argonne and Les Eparges. They treat 
chiefly the most severe cases, and have a very 
large percentage of cures. 

All over France chateaux have been turned into 
hospitals, their chapels made the operating theatre, 
humble barracks adding themselves, democrati- 
cally, as need comes for more and yet more beds. 
But Faux Miroir has its special history. Indeed, 
history has very quickly crept over that region of 
the Marne, like quick-growing ivy. The cream- 

104 



PLANTATIONS OF THE DEAD 

colored chateau and the little high-shouldered 
cream-colored lodge were, at the time of the 
battle of the Marne, the headquarters of the Ger- 
man army. The crown prince lived in the lodge. 
The doctors showed me a grave almost directly 
opposite the front door of the chateau. It was 
that of a German officer who had been shot 
through the lungs. He had sat out on the porch 
of the chateau for three days, dying, looking across 
the lovely sloping country, hearing the guns, with 
who knows what thoughts flooding his mind. 
When he was dead the crown prince had come out 
of the high-shouldered red-roofed lodge and made 
a fiery speech, with himself in the foreground, 
and his country and his father's friend Herr 
Gott in the background. But it was the French 
who put a black cross up over the dead man's 
grave. Perhaps the Germans lacked the time for 
that; at any rate, they had to retreat so quickly 
that the French found six Germans drunk in the 
cellar, their heads pillowed on heaps of champagne 
bottles. As one of the orderlies put it, they were 
probably waiting to be waked about the time Von 
Kluck was to be eating his Christmas dinner in 
Paris. 

There were many stories they told me of the 
German invaders and of the courage and sweet- 
ness of the French patients. After luncheon we 
took a walk across the fields. I did not under- 
stand what I was to see. I came upon it and its 
meaning suddenly. Simply, we were walking over 

105 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

a lumpish meadow behind the chateau. In the dis- 
tance was the shadowy bulwark of the Argonne 
woods. The field was about four acres in extent. 
It began at a road, quite shelterless, except for 
two tall trees, and it sloped up to a little tree-set 
ridge where we could dimly see what looked like 
ditches. Suddenly one of the doctors began to 
talk about the little French soldiers who had gone 
between those two trees, as through a gate, un- 
sheltered, in the face of murderous machine-gun 
fire. How vivid his quiet words made the picture. 
The ditches on the tree-set ridge were trenches 
the Germans had dug, — some of the very few 
trenches used in the battle of the Marne. In each 
of them from two to six Germans knelt with a 
machine-gun. Raked by this relentless fire, the 
French soldiers had come on, their red trousers 
and caps making everyone of them a target. 
Some of them had never faced fire before. 
Doubtless none of them had fought in such a bare 
field. But they had not turned back, nor had they 
dropped to look for shelter behind any of the 
rough hummocks of the meadow. They dropped 
only when the German guns struck them down. 

Step by step we followed the brave red route 
the French had chosen, — but we faltered at the 
sight of their graves. They had taken back their 
lands from the Germans, but at such cost! And 
his comrades had buried each dead man where 
he had fallen. There they slept, the ones who 
had gone farthest up the hill lying near the Ger- 

106 



PLANTATIONS OF THE DEAD 

man trenches. The same coverlid of withered 
grass lay over them and over the side of the 
trenches. The rusty tins from which the Germans 
had eaten their food had not been taken away. 
About each grave was built a fence made of four 
slim boughs, joined to each other at right angles. 
Across the side of this was placed some article of 
clothing of the soldier's, — his shirt or coat. 
Sometimes at the head of each grave was a cross 
made of two saplings nailed together. On one or 
two there had been an attempt to write in pencil 
the name and regiment of the soldier, but time had 
weathered the words away. 

" Perhaps the graves ought to be better pro- 
tected," said one of the doctors. " But there has 
been no time. It is of the living we have to think. 
These heroes will come into their own when the 
war is over. If all these graves were banked in 
flowers, from here to Meaux, along all the stretch 
of land where these men died, still they could not 
have meant more to France than they do." 

Unknown soldiers of France, but never to be 
forgotten by the nation. There they lie without 
names, a part of that rough meadow which they 
died to win. In the springtime perhaps the plough 
will turn aside from their graves, and in summer 
the wheat will creep up against their enclosures, 
and red poppies will grow over their loyal hearts. 
In the winter the rain and the wind will dash over 
their rough covering. For them it was as good an 
ending as any man could have. 

107 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

They had been in battle a month, those young 
men who died in the battle of the Marne, boys in 
the early twenties, most of them. They had 
known the glory of mobilization, — and then the 
dawning horror of what war really was. What 
a terrible initiation for each into a life so differ- 
ent from anything he had ever dreamed of ! Who 
can tell what they suffered of humiliation, of 
hunger, of weariness, of wounds, as the Germans 
slowly pushed them back ? Who knows what price 
they paid in that month? They must have died, 
poor boys, without knowing whether or not they 
died in vain. Was this forced retreat of theirs to 
be continued, even after help should come? 
Would France, in the end, see victory? Who 
knows what their thought was as they died the 
death, quick, or slow and painful, for France? 
They have paid their part of the price, — but the 
women who loved them have a long, long price 
yet to pay. 

A wide plantation of the dead, that battlefield 
of the Marne, extending all the way from Verdun 
to Meaux. These thousands of graves, marking 
the French miles, these haphazard ranks of dead 
men seem as if they were still defending France. 
Themselves, through their stark, nameless little 
mounds, speak better than any oratory that will 
ever be uttered over them. 

Usually civilians who are allowed to see the 
battlefield of the Marne go first to Meaux. We 
are told that it should really be called the battle- 

108 



PLANTATIONS OF THE DEAD 

field of the Ourcq. The Ourcq is a tributary of 
the Marne, and close to its waters, on a ridge a 
little way from the Soissons road, northeast of 
Vareddes, the Sixth French army attacked the 
flank of Von Kluck's first German army. 

Perhaps it is not surprising that already at 
Meaux, at Revigny, at Gerbervillers, and in vari- 
ous other cities that have been bombarded or devas- 
tated by the Germans, guides have sprung up who 
are willing to exhibit and explain the symbols of 
the French tragedy. Already they have their pic- 
ture post cards and their souvenirs to sell; already 
at tongue's end little reels of sad stories, miracu- 
lous escapes, strange captures of spies, and ironic 
revenges. 

The carriages that meet the Paris train at 
Meaux to-day are suggestive of what Meaux will 
be like when the real tourists come. At present 
the only cars in the zone are military cars; too 
many spies made use of cars in the early days. 
Meantime, the drivers of the carriages have a 
glorious freedom in fixing the tariff for a tour 
over the battlefield. But in return each is willing 
to tell his tale of flight at approach of the Ger- 
mans, and of a quick return to help bury the dead. 
He is also willing to point out shops where sou- 
venirs can be bought in the shape of objects made 
out of bits of shell. It is all a little reminiscent 
of our own Civil War battlefields. It seems a bit 
like a tale often told, not as if it were still alive, 
still a tragedy with the end not yet in sight. 

109 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

Once on the road to Soissons this second-hand 
effect wears away. The atmosphere of the war 
zone comes back. A sentinel in blue steps into the 
middle of the road, his bayonet fixed. He ex- 
amines the permits of everyone who tries to pass. 
Even the gray military motors must stop for the 
inspection of papers. The road winds above the 
top of the slope, and then down on the other side. 
There lies a mound, surrounded by a fence of 
barbed wire, and surmounted by a little standard 
bearing the star and crescent, — graves of the 
Moroccoans. No one knows how many of these 
men from Northern Africa lie there. 

The driver points with his whip to a little black 
cross in a barbed-wire enclosure. It bears the 
little A for " Allemand" — a German grave. 

" They burned most of their dead, the Ger- 
mans," the driver says. " So we could n't dis- 
cover what their losses were. Higher up we found 
a layer of ashes more than a foot thick. They 're 
ploughed under now." 

Across the next ridge we see the marks of the 
battle in scarred and mutilated tree-trunks. The 
driver indicates the eastern ridge where the Ger- 
man batteries lay, and the western point where 
the French had their guns. He makes us see what 
the road looked like when the battle was done. 
The heaps of trees and earth could be cleared 
away, but never the graves along the roadside. 

Vareddes, with its patched front doors; Etre- 
pilly and the three battle monuments* and, be- 

uo 



PLANTATIONS OF THE DEAD 

yond, a sea of white flags marking the many, many 
graves of the unknown men who died for France. 
They lie near Chambry, where the French Zouaves 
made, for five days, such a brave fight in the ceme- 
tery. They lie near the little village of Penchard, 
the spot nearest Paris which the Germans reached. 
In pastures, in grain fields, by the roadsides they 
sleep, in no order; just great drifts of graves, dug 
wherever the soldiers died. They form no con- 
ventional cemetery; here are no monuments, no 
head wreaths. Occasionally over the barbed-wire 
enclosure of a grave is suspended a glass bottle, 
containing the name and rank of the soldier. On 
some of the graves near Barcy lie small white 
bottles containing cards on which was printed 
this: 

" Madame Parmentier, Paris, 10 Passage Saint 
Ambroise, would be grateful to anyone who could 
furnish her the very least information concerning 
her son, Auguste Maurice Parmentier, soldier of 
the 246th regiment of Infantry, 21st company, 
who fell at Barcy, September 6th, 1914." 

I did not see all the long miles of the battlefield 
on the same day. It was on three separate days 
that the wide plantation was unrolled for me. 
And the sadness of it all would have been unbear- 
able if, here and there, I had not come across in- 
stances of hope and happiness. Two episodes 
stand out especially in my memory. One was my 
meeting with Antoinette. She was striding along, 
skirting a field in which lay some of the unmarked 

in 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

graves of the men of the Marne. But she was not 
looking at them. She was looking beyond them, 
and singing aloud as she went towards the railway 
station, carrying in her right hand a bundle, and 
in her left her precious permit that allowed her 
to go to Paris. 

" Me! " she said. " I am going back. I was 
visiting my uncle in the north of France when 
pouf ! of a sudden came the war, like a hot wind 
that no one is looking for. My father and my 
brother were mobilized; they are dead; and my 
mother died of grief. My fiance went, but oh, 
madame, he is alive ! alive ! He is now a reforme. 
He has lost one arm and one eye, but what of that? 
We can keep a little shop just the same and be 
happy." 

She began to cough heavily, terribly. 

" It is nothing," she said; " it was lucky for me, 
that cough! The Germans said I must work in 
the fields. I said I would not; and they put me in 
prison for six months. Then I got ill and they 
sent me away. I am afraid I troubled them too 
much," she added, laughing. 

" Last night, where I stayed," she went on hap-, 
pily, " there was such bright light — oh, all I 
wanted ! Only in the big cities in Northern France 
do they have real light — gas, electricity. We in 
the little towns cannot afford candles at twenty 
cents. So we make little lamps out of bacon fat 
with a string in it. But perhaps the war will be 
over soon. Last night I thought that by the time 

112 



PLANTATIONS OF THE DEAD 

Henri and I have our shop the war must be over. 
Madame, say you think that some time peace will 
come back to France ! " 

We spoke a little longer and then she went on. 
I looked after Antoinette, walking to meet her 
happiness, and I knew that some day in France 
more than bravery and hope will flourish; love and 
happiness will come back, and not only to France, 
but to all the war-harmed world, for these are 
immortal. 

The other episode was a drama in the dark. 
I heard only the voices of the two who spoke, felt 
their emotion. As the town in which I was staying 
overnight was so near the front, no light dared 
show. I was feeling my way down an utterly 
dark street. Nothing can be lonelier than to be 
in a strange town in the dark, uncertain where one 
is going. 

I could hear subdued voices behind shuttered 
windows. Occasionally I could hear footsteps, 
a friendly and yet fearful sound, and I would wait 
till the pedestrian came up with me and would ask 
my way. Quiet streets, a black, star-sown sky, 
far-away voices, — somehow I felt, as never be- 
fore, the mystery of life and the essential loneli- 
ness of every human soul. 

The sidewalk ended abruptly upon turf, and I 
walked on blindly a few paces. Then I paused, 
afraid of the enveloping space, wanting the touch 
of a hand, the welcome of a voice. Dimly I made 
out a gray-black wall, with a black shadow against 

113 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

it. As I hesitated, voices came from the shadows. 

" Oh, Pierre, — is it that you love little ugly 
me!" whispered a girl's wondering joy-choked 
voice. 

" Ah, my little Marie-Louise," replied a man's 
deep voice, u this war, it has made me! What 
was I? A careless, selfish, laughing boy, wanting 
the prettiest girl and the most of everything that 
came my way. But in the trenches, Marie-Louise, 
I have grown old in my heart and old in my head. 
Sitting out there I see what is good, what is bad. 
I am a man now, Marie-Louise, and I know the 
best, — you, and after the war, home and peace." 

I felt my way back to the sidewalk and got to 
my destination by some other route. If there was 
anything sinister in the darkness it had gone. As 
long as love and faith and humility still exist in 
the world good will come even out of this war. 

That little drama was in my mind the day I saw 
what was almost my most tragic sight in all 
France, — that poignant acre in Chalons. I had 
well-nigh forgotten my errand, in the beauty of 
that memory of the two lovers who had so miracu- 
lously found each other, — for it is always a 
miracle when two real lovers meet. 

Then suddenly I remembered, for at a cross- 
roads we drew up sharply to let pass a funeral 
procession. How heavily it went by; first a little 
chorister bearing a cross, on which drooped a 
Christ, — strange symbol in this time of war; a 
Christ " whose sad face sees only this after the 

114 



PLANTATIONS OF THE DEAD 

passion of a thousand years." Then came the 
cure in his vestments, his old white face inalien- 
ably sad; next walked his assistant priest, and then 
came the hearse. It was a military wagon, drawn 
by mules, and on it lay two coffins covered with 
the French flag. Soldiers, then, and whose, be- 
sides their country's, it was not difficult to tell, for 
as close to them as she could walk came an old 
woman. She was a stout, plain old woman in 
black; her neck was wry, and as she went she 
shook her old head and heavy tears dropped down 
her cheeks. The grotesqueness only made her 
grief more terrible. She walked alone; among 
those who followed after there was no husband or 
daughter to help her bear her loss. What road in 
France is there that had not known such a 
procession? 

And then we came to the soldiers' graveyard 
in Chalons-sur-Marne. It must have been a 
beautiful sward once, before it shouldered its 
freight of death. To the right, at the back, was 
a low green hill, and as we entered a little child 
in black ran down it, laughing. Nothing else 
seemed natural. At the right, on an elevation, 
were rows of officers' graves, separated each from 
the other by a foot or two of space, and beside 
them the gray stone wall bore several wreaths 
in honor of them and of the private soldiers. But 
these did not hold the eye ; rather it sprang to the 
left, to the great glittering acres, close-set with 
crosses where the soldiers lay who had given their 

115 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

lives to France in the battle of the Marne, — new, 
staring, abnormal, poignant acres ! 

For a graveyard should be softened, mellow, 
a place of growth, where old sorrows are healing 
as new sorrows enter. The old, the middle-aged, 
and the young should lie here side by side, even 
as in life they savor together the daily taste and 
color of this our world. Families should lie to- 
gether; there should be, as in life, a sense of prog- 
ress; the sense that death, however remorseless, 
preserves its rhythms and cycles, deserves, too, 
acceptance. 

But the graveyard of Chalons, — it holds no 
old men, no children, no married couples, no 
women. There are only hundreds upon hundreds 
of young men, all blotted together, in the course 
of a few days, from the world of life. These 
beautiful young men, still in their dreams loving 
France, but wanting this world, too; and now they 
lie in stark ranks, with all their dear human future 
forever unfulfilled. 

The wide surface that covers them is flat; their 
levelled graves are set as close together as may 
be. Gay flowers are planted at their feet, and at 
the head of each is a wooden cross. Sometimes 
the cross is black with a white name-board; some- 
times it is white. Often a crucifix of white beads, 
bearing a metal Christ, is fastened upon the wood. 
There are many bead wreaths, white or blue ; some 
wreaths are made of lavender flowers. All of 
them bear some inscription: " To my husband," 

116 



PLANTATIONS OF THE DEAD 

" To my papa," " To my brother," " To my com- 
rade." And from the many name-plates it is the 
age that stands out: " Chamonade, Jean, soldier 
of the 43d infantry, died the 15th of March, 191 5, 
aged 21 years," "Pierre Deschamps, Corporal, 
aged 22." So many died in March, so many 
under twenty-three. 

A place too sad for tears, where women in black 
walk slowly and ask, for these silent ranks of 
young, why they had to die. And one can only 
bear it because of the little child that ran laughing 
down the hill, because there are other children yet 
to be born who need not pay the price of the 
spring of nineteen hundred and fifteen. 



117 



CHAPTER VIII 

Nancy, the Invincible 

1 begged very hard for that trip to Nancy. If 
I could get as far as that it would be possible 
to get a bit farther, and see the trenches be- 
yond the city; or it would be possible to go 
through the stretch of Lorraine devastated by 
the Germans. But, above all, I wanted to see 
Nancy because the city had always touched my 
imagination. It is so flavored with the spirit of 
its people. Year by year through the sweeping 
centuries, back almost for a thousand years, they 
have made magnificent history for Nancy, — 
laity and clergy, workmen and soldiers, captains 
and kings, and the crown of them were the great 
dukes of Lorraine. They passed along the streets 
to hold court or to go to the hunt or to go to their 
devotions in their chapels, — and at last to go to 
their eternal rest with lofty funeral pomp. They 
were not afraid of death, those high and puissant 
lords ; they liked to face it, and they wished to sur- 
round it with pomp and circumstance. Nor were 
they afraid of being forgotten by Nancy or by 
France, for in their shadowy, still chapel is 
blazoned this inscription : " You who pass, stop 
and wonder at these tombs; among these dukes 
of Lorraine are so many heroes, among their 

118 



NANCY, THE INVINCIBLE 

duchesses so many great women, among their 
children so many princes born for the throne 
worthier still of heaven." And the reading on 
each tomb begins, " To the immortal memory 
of " 

But particularly I wanted to go to Nancy be- 
cause of her present history. For if ever the soul 
of a nation can be expressed in stone, then Nancy, 
the beautiful, is the soul of France. As she stands 
against the Germans, so stands all France. 

" You shall not have us," the people of Nancy 
say, " and all those murderous shells you cast upon 
us shall find us unmoved." 

The Germans have always wanted Nancy as a 
predatory long-plotting man may covet a woman 
whom some jealous nerve warns him is not for 
him. Centuries ago, when she was nothing but a 
castle, they wanted her. Their desire grew with 
the centuries. The Franco-Prussian War, and 
their eager hands came close. They punished the 
Nancy they dared not take with heavy tributes. 
They would crush if they could not conquer. 
Their love for her took on a tinge of hate, — a 
tinge that should disappear once they possessed 
her. Nancy's manufactures must die if her na- 
tionality did not. And then, once more, the im- 
perturbable city triumphed over her enemies. For 
when almost half of the Alsatians in conquered 
Alsace refused German nationality thousands of 
them migrated from Strasbourg to Nancy and re- 
vivified the industries. So Nancy had taken what 

119 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

belonged to Germany! One more reason for 
bringing Nancy to her knees. The tinge of hate 
grew deeper. Nancy was a frontier city, and what 
frontier but may be changed? Just a few years 
of waiting, — just till The Day. 

The Day has come, but Nancy is still untaken. 
And when bombs fall from the Taubes upon her, 
when shells come roaring in from the great three- 
hundred-and-eighties, when buildings are wrecked, 
and little children are killed or mangled, Nancy 
says, 

" We shall carry on as usual." 

That brave city was like a heroine to me and 
I wanted to see her. At last permission was 
granted, and once more I set out in the deep-blue 
dawn for the Gare du Nord. And then my day 
began dramatically, for I met Ninette. Long ago, 
when I was a student in Paris, I had known Ninette 
in a casual way. I lived in a street on the edge of 
the Latin Quarter, in the middle of which was a 
little laundry. Whenever I entered I would see 
the beautiful ten-year-old Ninette, staring from 
behind the counter with eyes too eager. 

I would see her peering from behind the skirts 
of her shrewish step-mother at the young men of 
the studios as they passed by with their filettes on 
their arms. And I am afraid that Ninette's eyes 
were too knowing. The concierge of the building 
where I lived, who sat always in the doorway, or 
at the window, scrutinizing and estimating the life 
that went by her, said of Ninette, 

1 20 



NANCY, THE INVINCIBLE 

" She will become a fille de joie, that one. But 
what can you expect, with such a stepmother! 
Clean clothes, that woman makes, but her heart is 
a coal!" 

A few months before the war, when I was back 
in Paris and was visiting my old stamping-grounds, 
I sought the concierge to find out what had become 
of everybody. She gave me a systematic history 
of the street, from the restaurant at one end to 
the patisserie at the other. Half way down she 
spoke of Ninette. 

" She became a model early, that young one," 
said the concierge. " Her face and figure, — ah, 
well, one need not be a painter to admire them. 
She did well enough. If she had been wise, 
madame, she could have made money, and in the 
end married some decent workman and set up 
a little shop. But no, two years ago she must 
throw herself away on a worthless gamin. She 
gives her very skin to that one, madame. He eats 
her money up, he drinks, he beats her, but she will 
not leave him. This will show you how worthless 
he is, madame. He is called Ninette's ami. 
People do not trouble themselves to remember his 
name. She is finished, is Ninette, madame." 

The next time I saw the concierge was a few 
days before I took the trip to Nancy. A tall, 
beautiful girl was with her — Ninette. Her 
eyes were sad, and yet proud; her hands were 
roughened, and she was, for a Parisian, rather 
carelessly dressed. I found out afterwards that 

121 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

she worked in the kitchen of a hotel. After greet- 
ings were over the concierge said, 

" Tell madame about your Rene. Tell her; for 
you have reason to be proud, my girl. He is 
Ninette's ami, that madame knows of," she added 
to me. 

Ninette glowed and spoke and then faltered. 
Rene was wonderful ; so brave. He had gone into 
the terrible trenches and had never flinched, had 
laughed and sung, had done inconceivably brave 
things. He had won the croix de guerre; more 
than that, an honor almost unheard of for a pri- 
vate, he had won a commission. He was a man 
to rule men was Rene. 

Just one of the common instances of a useless 
creature being made over into a man by the war. 

" It was Ninette," said the concierge proudly, 
" who gave this man to France. He is coming 
back on his permission, - — the first he has had in 
two years. All his friends in the Quarter will 
praise him, but there are some of us who will 
praise Ninette more." 

Ninette flushed, paled, seemed to quail, and soon 
withdrew. 

" Poor child," said the concierge, " she has 
known of other cases of men who were killed just 
before their permissions. She is afraid." 

I wondered if it were that. And when I met 
her that morning in the blue dawn at the Gare du 
Nord I knew the concierge had been wrong. All 
night long Ninette had sat there, waiting for 

122 



NANCY, THE INVINCIBLE 

Rene's train. Her face was haggard, her eyes 
heavily shadowed. As I had over an hour to wait 
for my train I took her to a cafe for coffee. It 
was hard to make her go, for Rene's train was 
expected at any moment. 

" You '11 look prettier if you are fed," I argued. 

Ninette yielded, drank the coffee, raced me back 
into the station, and then said, her rich voice 
breaking, 

" Ah, madame, it does not matter whether I 
am pretty or not, for I do not mean that he shall 
see me. I am only going to see him pass by. I 
shall not meet him. I am afraid, afraid." 

" But, Ninette," I began; and then paused. 
Of what use to remind her of all she had done 
for him. Benefits can be forgot, and even grati- 
tude cannot warm a love that has chilled. 

" Do — do you mean he has n't answered your 
letters? " I asked. 

" He never wrote; except to tell me of his deco- 
ration or to ask for a parcel. But that was like 
him. No, madame, it is not that. But he is a 
great man, now, and I — I am only Ninette. 
I am getting old; I am twenty-six. Rene, — he is 
twenty-five, that is young. There are so many 
pretty girls in the Quarter, and men so scarce now, 
and Rene a hero — ah, he will not turn to me. 
And who will blame him? I — I have not the 
courage; I will just look at him and go away! " 

A surge of men in blue came through from a 
platform, and Ninette clutched my arm and fled 

123 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

behind a pillar. I fled, too, — towards the train 
for Nancy. I shared her cowardice. Who would 
know, better than this girl, who loved him, the 
•man's weakness or baseness ? She might fear from 
a bitter knowledge, or from the timidity of her 
own love. I had said to Eleanor that in the war 
zone I was always getting the beginnings of stories 
or the middles, but not often the beginning, the 
middle, and the end. Here was the end ready 
to my hand, — and I ran away. 

While I was standing before the gate leading 
to the platform where my train stood I did let 
my eye flicker over to that other platform. And 
I think I saw Ninette walking away with a blue 
arm encircling her waist. I think so, but I shall 
never know, because of my inability to bear a sad 
ending. If Rene failed her, if some young pretty 
hero-worshipper took him away and Ninette sat, 
like Ida, hearing 

". . . their shrill, happy laughter; " 

if the Latin Quarter only saw the hero in Rene 
and forgave, as the world does, the disloyal 
heart, — then I don't want to know it. I shall 
try to think of Ninette in what must have been 
her proudest moment — the day the first news 
came from the trenches about his bravery, and she 
could boast to her friends; the day her man 
stopped being " Ninette's ami " and became 
" Rene." 

In the train to Nancy I found a comforting con- 
124 



NANCY, THE INVINCIBLE 

trast to the episode of Ninette. Here was the 
happy middle of a story. An officer and his young 
bride shared the compartment with me. They 
looked disappointed when I entered, and I would 
have withdrawn if there had been another seat on 
the train. However, by determinedly looking 
out of the window I showed them that I would try 
not to be there. The little bride could not have 
been more than sixteen; her hair hung over her 
shoulders in curls. The officer was old enough 
to be her father. How they melted to each other, 
those two, murmuring and clinging. With what 
tenderness he put on and off her coat, drawing it 
closely about her white childish neck. Probably 
they had married on his brief leave, and an indul- 
gent superior officer was giving them all possible 
time together. As soon as breakfast was an- 
nounced I left them, lingering over it as long as I 
could; after that I stood in the passage between 
two tall officers bound for Toul, and watched the 
Marne valley unfold itself. 

Soft hills, red roofs, Epernay, Chalons-sur- 
Marne; Bar-le-Duc; Gondrecourt, where the offi- 
cer and his wife descended for their last few 
hours together; Toul; and twilight beginning. 
Then a deep-green stream, edged by tall, slim, 
evenly set trees. A barge drawn by horses was 
passing down, the bargee leaning out to watch the 
train or to gaze up lazily at the deep blue tent of 
the sky. 

Nancy; a descent in the darkness, amid a surge 
125 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

of blue soldiers home for permission; the little 
office of the inspector of police, who scanned my 
permit and me keenly and questioned me closely. 
For, at the moment, I was not personally con- 
ducted and Nancy must beware of spies. The 
hotel then, and the patron opening wide eyes at 
the sight of me. 

" Pardon, madame," he said, " but it is hard 
for the stranger to enter Nancy now; in that it 
is like the kingdom of Heaven." 

He began at once to tell about the advantage 
of his cellar, and I gathered that the traveller in 
Nancy now does not ask for a bedroom and bath 
but for a bedroom and cellar. I found, later, that 
nearly all the houses in Nancy bear, painted in red 
beside the doorways, the double cross of Lorraine, 
to announce that they have good cellars where 
passersby may take refuge during a daylight 
bombardment. 

I had tea and some of the famous Nancy maca- 
roons in a little patisserie, and I remarked to 
madame, the proprietor, that the moon looked 
very lovely coming up over the silent square. 
Madame pursed her lips and arched two delicate 
black brows. 

" We are not quite so pleased to see the moon 
here in Nancy as we used to be," she replied, 
shrugging a shoulder in the direction of Germany. 
" Me, I do not mind the shells in the daytime, but 
at night it is disagreeable." 

" Disagreeable " struck me as a restrained 
word. 

126 



NANCY, THE INVINCIBLE 

" My little Pierre," madame continued, " that 
one, he sleeps — oh, but like a little pig or a 
Boche. The siren never wakes him, and he is so 
heavy to carry down two flights of stairs to the 
cellar. It is not a treat, that, to carry a heavy 
child so far. But it is better than if he cried and 
stayed awake the rest of the night. Now I have 
moved our beds to the ground floor." 

I condoled with her, and then she said with a 
touch of superiority, 

" Madame, then, has never assisted in a bom- 
bardment of the three-hundred-and-eighties? " 

" No, but I have assisted in a bombardment of 
the seventy-sevens. Also I have assisted in ma- 
chine gun and rifle firing." 

We boasted gently, she trying to prove that the 
suspense induced by three-hundred-and-eighties 
was infinitely greater than that induced by the 
seventy-sevens, allowing no advantages to the fact 
of a view from front-line trenches. I described the 
sound of the seventy-sevens and the look of the 
black smoke ; she, standing dramatically behind her 
fruit tarts and macaroons, described the bursting 
of the great shells. 

" If you are in a village outside Nancy and have 
good ears," she said, " you can hear the faint 
whistle of the shell as it travels ; then it bursts with 
a short dull roar. But if you are two hundred 
yards away from where the shell falls, you do not 
hear it coming. You hear a great report with a 
roar afterwards, and then you hear the houses 

127 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

crumbling. It is a dull sound, that crumbling, but 
it does not last long. Glass breaks everywhere; 
there is a bad smoke and then dust everywhere. 
It is not agreeable." 

She spoke almost indifferently, as if she would 
not give the enemy the poor satisfaction even of 
resentment. Suddenly she began to laugh. 

" It is of my first bombardment that I think," 
she said; " my Pierre was with his grandmother, 
so I had not that on my mind. Me, I was staying 
with my friend whose husband is the patron of 
a hotel here. Of a sudden what a sound, — all 
the electric bells in the hotel ringing, all the tele- 
phones. The shells! The Boche! Quick, the 
cellar! There were two officers staying in the 
hotel who did not trouble themselves to rise. But 
everyone else ran to the cellar. 

" Ah, madame, it was to laugh ! Ladies so 
meagre in their dressing-gowns, and so strange 
with no rouge and without hair. And the men so 
thin, too, in their night-clothes. All pushing, with 
never a pardon ! When we got down to the cellar 
— but it was cold ! We sat on the coal and leaned 
against the hogsheads of wine, and the women re- 
membered their difficulties and lowered their 
heads, and the men said 'Pardon!' and sat on 
their slippers to warm and to hide their ankles. It 
was very amusing that. The commercial travel- 
lers chattered their teeth with the cold and said 
they were not afraid, and told us what they would 
do to the Germans if they were not civilians. 

128 



NANCY, THE INVINCIBLE 

They were not people of Nancy," added madame, 
with the faintest touch of contempt. " For us, 
it is nothing, these bombardments! " 

I could scarcely believe in the bombardments 
that night. I was the only person apparently in 
the streets, and I wandered under the moon in 
the beautiful, still squares where the fountains 
sounded so loud and the stars seemed so far away. 
But next day the effect of the German warfare in 
Nancy was brought sharply home to me. I was 
walking in the beautiful gardens of the city hos- 
pital, and I found myself running in the direction 
of a ground-floor ward whence issued a baby's 
terrible screams, — running because these were 
cries too dreadful to bear. It seemed as if all the 
world should stop to help that little one. This 
was not at all like the fretful crying we are used 
to when a little stomach is in temporary pain or is 
in haste for milk. This was tortured screaming; 
it sounded like the cry I once heard of an animal 
that was burning to death. 

I dashed open the ward door and came upon 
little six-months-old Jeanne Beganson having her 
wounds dressed, — wounds made by the latest 
German bombardment of Nancy. One sister- 
nurse was holding the little martyred body; two 
others were dressing it; still another was putting 
milk to the baby's lips. That little mutilated body, 
deep in its waxen surface dull red wounds, ragged, 
ghastly; the little tortured face; the glassy eyes 
searching frantically (and in vain) for her mother. 

129 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

The shell that wounded Jeanne wrecked the 
lives of four people. Her father was one of 
Nancy's soldiers. He fought bravely, which 
means that he fought like a Frenchman, and was 
so badly wounded that it was impossible to send 
him back to the trenches. After a time work was 
found for him; his wife earned a little money, too, 
by working at home, and, believing in fresh air 
and exercise, she used, in her leisure time, to walk 
the streets of Nancy with her two little boys. One 
day she was going home with the children to get 
luncheon when the siren sounded, announcing the 
approach of a German three-hundred-and-eighty. 
She was near her own door in ancient Grand Rue ; 
she ran, but the great shell ground out the lives of 
her and of her two little sons. 

There were other wounded people in that ward : 
little Renee Blaison, whose mother and sister were 
killed; she has had forty pieces of shell taken from 
her body and she is paralyzed. But she smiles — 
except when Jeanne's wounds are dressed. Across 
the ward I saw a woman wounded six months be- 
fore; the flesh was stripped from her arms and 
legs, and the bones themselves fearfully broken 
and crumbled, — like the house she lived in. She 
moans constantly with pain, but softly, so as not 
to disturb the others. There were other women 
with broken arms or legs; they smiled, too, except 
when the baby screamed. French people never 
complain in these days. 

So little Jeanne's wounds were dressed, and she 
130 



NANCY, THE INVINCIBLE 

lay too spent even to drink her milk. After a 
time she took it feebly. But she would not smile 
even when I made wonderful baby gurgles in my 
throat; she imitated them, tentatively, but she kept 
looking beyond me for a face she will never see 
again. Jeanne sees no reason for smiling. When 
she is older she will learn that France always 
smiles. 

Ruins, — in one way they do not matter. To 
stare at buildings with the faces ripped off so that 
one sees all the interior as if one opened the front 
of a doll's house; to see walls pock-marked with 
shrapnel, and heaps of meaningless rubbish where 
once were order and meaning — all this is only 
too common a sight in France. But commonness 
cannot destroy the poignancy nor the sense that 
this hacking of homes and women and children, 
this attrition of a non-fighting city, is something 
worse than killing soldiers. 

Nancy carries her wounded babies to the hos- 
pital, picks out of the ruins any furniture that is 
still useful, puts fresh panes of glass into what- 
ever houses have suffered lightly (marking with 
yellow strips of paper the panes that have sur- 
vived), and begins to clear away the debris with 
a view to rebuilding. Ever since the bombard- 
ment began this has been her way. By their atti- 
tude the Nancy people say to Germany, 

" You can neither take our Nancy nor drive us 
out of her. Not in any sense shall she be under 
your power." 

131 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

The Germans have a more or less definite sys- 
tem of shelling and bombarding Nancy. It rather 
makes one think of the processes of a nagging 
woman or man (for men naggers are not un- 
known, though rarely mentioned). Such a person 
has a devilish way of finding a raw spot and, with 
rigid finger, coming back at uncertain intervals 
to prod it, or, worse still, to hover over it. Irri- 
tation, nervous attrition, feverish waste, is the sole 
accomplishment. 

For their attacks they choose a bright day so 
that Taubes may indicate the range, or a bright 
moonlight night. Sometimes shelling will be fol- 
lowed by bombing from Taubes. Generally they 
send two in an afternoon or two or three at night; 
they seem to prefer a series of three. According 
to Rule One of the code of nagging, they wish to 
induce as much unpleasant uncertainty as possible. 
The people of Nancy go to bed with their cellar 
doors ajar. Close to their beds they put wraps 
and slippers. When the great shell is fired from 
the German lines a French sentry hears the report, 
telephones with lightning speed to Nancy, and 
then the siren sounds. The siren is like a great 
foghorn. When we are awakened at sea by a fog- 
horn we have a curious sense half of safety, half 
of danger. But when the siren of Nancy sounds 
there is nothing but the connotation of danger in 
that loud, long, sinister monotone. 

After the siren begins there is a full minute be- 
fore the shell falls. A good sprinter, travelling 

132 



NANCY, THE INVINCIBLE 

alone, could reach the shelter of his cellar about 
the time the shell found its goal. A mother with 
two or three little children to care for might get 
down one story, but scarcely two. During a recent 
bombardment, when a little ancient nunnery was 
destroyed, the seven nuns were in the second story. 
They managed to get to the first story, where they 
were entombed. The rooms in which they had 
been were shredded into dust. They were dug 
out safely, for excavating parties go at once after 
a bombardment to search for people who may be 
buried in the cellars. 

The Nancy cellars are by no means warm rooms 
next the furnace where one keeps the lawn-mower, 
the rakes, a few spare trunks, and an old bicycle. 
They are very cold, rather damp, dark, and nar- 
row, with vaulted roofs; they spell romance, if 
you like, but also gloom and rheumatism. I went 
to a school that had an excellent cellar, and saw 
the children happily at play. 

" What do you do in the cellar, little one? " I 
asked a pretty little girl. 

" We sing," she said gaily, " we are not 
afraid." 

" They are droll — these Bodies," said another 
with a funny air of mature criticism. 

But it was not droll in the cellar where there 
were no chairs, nothing but a dim lantern that 
scarcely made the darkness visible. The children 
not only sing, but learn poetry and are told stories. 
The first time they were taken into the cellar some 

133 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

of them were afraid. They did not cry but they 
grew white and trembled. 

" My little children," the principal said to them, 
" you must be brave. You must remember that 
you arc all the children of soldiers who are fight- 
ing for France. Perhaps your fathers will not 
come home again. If that happens you must bear 
it. You must bear anything that will help France. 
If you are brave and make nothing of these bom- 
bardments you will be helping France; you will 
be worthy to be the children of soldiers." 

That is the way the people of Nancy and of all 
France face facts. They face facts, but if they 
do not like a fact such as a bombardment they 
efface it as quickly as possible. The best way 
Nancy has known of effacing facts and ignoring 
them and getting the best of her enemies has been 
to carry on her business as usual. 

I found in the munition works a further symbol 
of the spirit of Nancy. It was night. Our mili- 
tary car tore through the darkness but the muni- 
tion factory was flaming defiantly with light. No 
German Taube cares to attack it for fear of being 
brought down by the perfect markmanship of 
the French anti-air-craft guns. The two vast 
buildings of the factory stand high, like steady, 
keenly-defined beacons. Inside there was a sense 
of crimson light, of dignified beautiful move- 
ment. It was more poetry than any idealized 
picture of industry could be — because here the 
ideal was real; the spirit of these workers, their 

*34 



NANCY, THE INVINCIBLE 

passion for France had to express itself in 
beauty. 

There was no confusion. In one place men 
poured the crimson molten steel into the moulds 
of the two-hundred-and-forty shells, in another 
place into the moulds of the three-hundred-and- 
twenties. Here great rows of red-topped moulds 
were cooling for two or three hours; here again 
men were beating the red-pointed shapes out of 
their moulds, and others were rolling them, glow- 
ing, into a pile to cool for another twenty hours. 
There girls were filling moulds with sand, quick, 
intent. Overhead moved with slow, heavy grace 
great cranes holding pots of liquid fire. At one 
side girls formed the bodies of sand that were to 
make the hollows of the shells. At the end of 
the immense room the industry seemed for a 
moment to concentrate itself where forty girls 
pushed an unbelievably large wagon loaded with 
moulds into the drying-oven. 

The grace and power of those straining young 
figures in their men's clothes and caps; the ab- 
sorbed look of the alert, serious faces ! There 
was in that whole factory no sense of wasted 
effort, no unnecessary noise, no hint of frivolity 
or lightness. Everywhere was a sense of harmony 
and beauty. It was in the great shop where the 
shells were being made; it was in the other great 
shop where they were turned and riveted and 
polished and tested and otherwise advanced in the 
processes of making. The oldest man and the 

1.35 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

strong boy of sixteen who beat a copper band upon 
a shell struck their hammers, each after each, in 
a perfect rhythm. The dark woman who bent 
and swayed over a turning-machine was in key 
with their movements. If there were dirt and 
beads of sweat and weariness they were not appar- 
ent; the spirit of the work soared above anything 
sordid or ugly in the process. Those deep-eyed 
girls and gaunt men were beautiful with the con- 
centrated passion, the " union sacree " of the 
nation, the pure love of France. What they were 
doing was great, but they were greater still. 

Nancy is perhaps unusually fortunate in her ad- 
ministration. Her broad-minded prefect, M. 
Mireman, her mayor, M. Simon, and her Bishop, 
Turinaz, work perfectly together, though they 
are men divergent in views and in experience. 
The citizens have perfect confidence in them. So 
has, for that matter, all Lorraine; one proof is 
that the paper money of Nancy is accepted in 
neighboring towns as if it were Bank of France 
money. Whatever these authorities propose or 
do the inhabitants accept. All the people are 
united by the desire to keep Nancy at her full 
stature. Great and small are afire with public 
spirit. There is a rich tanner in Nancy who, since 
the bombardment, has had his family constantly 
in the city. At Christmas he writes a personal 
letter to all of his employees at the front, and the 
" godsons " of his wife and daughter always spend 
their permissions with the family. There is a 

136 



NANCY, THE INVINCIBLE 

banker who owns large lodging-houses in which 
he receives free of charge refugees whose homes 
are in ruins and who are too old or too ill to work. 
In his garden he plants potatoes instead of flowers 
for needy people. On his fortnightly journeys to 
Paris he carries for distribution to the poor there 
trunks full of potatoes and coal. Nancy first — 
but all France too. And these men are but two. 
The tally is long of people who are giving all they 
can to their city and to their country. 

Many pictures I shall carry away from Nancy 
— the memory of the canteen where ladies, once 
of the Salon type, served the soldiers back on per- 
missions; the great vestiaire where other women 
gave clothes to the refugees ; a picture of a woman 
four of whose sons had died for France, as I saw 
her holding the miniature of her fifth and last 
son and looking, looking, as if her brave, pas- 
sionate eyes could keep him safe; the memory of 
another woman, old, not strong, sitting in a fire- 
less room because some day France might need 
coal more than she did. These Lorraine faces 
are not easily forgotten, fine, high of resolve, con- 
fident, infinitely kind. And always I shall think 
of little Jeanne and her wounds. 

I wish I could have made little Jeanne smile, 
but I like to think that she will smile. One day, 
when the war is well over and her broken father 
is at rest beside her mother and little brothers, she 
will walk the beautiful squares of Nancy with her 
lover. She will look at the moon that used to 

137 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

mean bombardments for Nancy, and she will be 
happy. All these red griefs will be no more real 
to her than the griefs of our Civil War are to us. 
Each generation, perhaps mercifully, must forge 
its own imagination of evil and sorrow; each gen- 
eration, wastefully, cannot learn deeply enough 
the lessons of the wars of the last generation. But 
the bitter lore of this world-war has surely told. 
Perhaps there will be no more wars to wound 
babies and hearts and to sear consciences. Little 
Jeanne will smile. Meanwhile brave Nancy 
smiles, stands steady, with her back towards the 
thwarted Germans, is serene, triumphant, can 
never yield to fear. For Nancy is not just Nancy; 
she is the immortal spirit of all France. 



138 



CHAPTER IX 

The Black Trail 

The military officer who had me in charge the 
day we visited the devastated districts in Lor- 
raine asked me to leave my camera behind. But 
I did not need it. I shall never forget the series 
of pictures that unrolled before me that lambent 
sunny day. 

Of course we did not set out as early as we had 
planned. In France every clock seems to tell a 
different tale. We drove through one of the seven 
beautiful gates of Nancy, and bowled along a 
quiet road. From one ridge where the car stopped 
we could see across to the hills where the German 
trenches lay. Harmless-looking brownish slopes, 
once the easy pasture for Lorraine sheep, now a 
resting place for German infantry. For since 
the early month of the war, this sector behind 
Nancy has been quiet. By a tacit agreement each 
side has come to a " live and let live " basis. 
French women and old men and boys till the land 
almost up to the French trenches. Beyond the 
hill the Germans do the same. One hears stories 
of patrols from French Lorraine and from Ger- 
man Lorraine exchanging news with the Germans 
as to the state of their crops, and (favorite topic) 

139 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

exchanging views as to the probable duration of 
the war. 

We drove, then, through a quiet country-side. 
Only the road reminded us of the war. Men were 
driving loads of potatoes up to the trenches; or 
loads of wood. Soldiers passed by on horseback. 
Others were marching up to the trenches. We 
met two companies that had recently been released 
from an active sector, — those who had not re- 
mained there forever, or been taken to the hos- 
pitals. The men looked worn and old, but cheer- 
ful ; they were glad to be going to a quiet sector. 

Our chauffeur was a swift driver. He dashed 
us over the quiet country-side so quickly that we 
could scarcely see the abandoned trenches. Only 
when we passed through a village did he slacken 
speed. Each little village usually consisted of one 
long street, and in all of them soldiers seemed to 
be billeted. We saw them in the white frame of 
doorways, or in the dark recesses of blacksmith- 
shops or barns, or walking down alleys or in fields 
with young women. It was good to see them at 
play. 

Here and there we passed graves in fields — the 
French soldiers who had died in helping to push 
back the Germans. Each grave was surmounted 
by a little name-plate in tricolor, the gift of an 
organization of French women. Here and there 
we passed a ruin. But I began to realize what the 
devastated region was only when we came to what 
had been the farm of Leomont. 

140 



THE BLACK TRAIL 

As we looked at it from the road it seemed like 
any ancient ruin destroyed by time, its strong gray 
walls standing raggedly on a hill, high up against 
the blue sky. It was only when we reached it that 
we found that it was a fresh ruin, made, not invol- 
untarily by time, but by voluntary German fire. 

A large farm, once ; here were the four square 
remains of what had been the house. Hard by 
were the ruins of outhouses, of cellars, and in the 
green grass between them the graves of unknown 
Frenchmen. As they stood, the ruins were per- 
haps more impressive than the whole buildings 
may have been; they looked like the fallen keep 
and towers of some great castle, so massive were 
they in their desolation. But the marks of shell 
and fire on the tumbled walls, the broken trees, 
the graves, all reminded us of the peaceful, happy 
agricultural life that had been forever altered. 

From the hill was a wonderful view of Vitre- 
mont Wood, where the French fought when they 
were retreating from Morhange. Here was the 
point of the last German advance. Up to this 
point they had burned villages by hand, but there- 
after, whatever they destroyed was by shells. 
And on this hill the French won a decisive fight. 
It can be said in eight words : the Germans held 
it ; the French took it. But what a costly victory, 
— over a thousand men killed and wounded in 
the bloody ascent of that rich hill which had 
never before been reddened except by sunset glow 
or the innocent scarlet of poppies ! 

141 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

And then, — the ruined villages; only too many 
of them; and all stark and terrible under the mel- 
low sunlight. Usually the sight of ruins is pleas- 
urable. The old stones with their clinging ivy 
stand for history, and for that concentrated ro- 
mance which it is so hard to find in ordinary daily 
living. The old tragedies associated with the old 
stones happened so long ago that they touch the 
imagination rather than the sympathies. But the 
ruins in that devastated stretch of Lorraine coun- 
try were raw, like wounds. There was no ivy; 
there was just the fresh signs of blighted living. 

Each village had its own individuality, — a fact 
which somehow made the desolation seem all the 
sadder. Here was a little town, once of red- 
roofed, rough-cast houses, everyone of which had 
been melted down into two long irregular huddling 
lines. There was another, where the top stones 
of the houses had been shorn off in a jagged, un- 
certain fashion; through the broken side of one 
we could see a little court, with the pump still 
standing. Outside another was a flight of stairs, 
leading up to nothing. Here was a long ruined 
street of houses, at the end of which was a stone 
fountain. As we walked through it, a boy leapt 
out of a cellar and dipped his strong young head 
in the water of the fountain. He had come back 
to see what was left of his old home, and was liv- 
ing in a little shed which had escaped destruction. 
And everywhere signs of that peaceful life of the 
days before the war: a little shop with the sign 

142 



THE BLACK TRAIL 

still standing, " Epicene " ; another with the shell- 
marked sign, " Brasserie" Bits of broken fur- 
niture; battered basins; splinters of china, once 
precious; a fragment of old blanket; the tangled 
wedge of a garden where the flowers went on 
growing, for all that no one came back to foster 
them. 

And the churches; the Germans seemed to have 
spared none of them. Here would be a little 
squat gray structure with its tall belfry; the belfry 
would be leaning, and the bell be fallen in the 
porch. Again, the roof of a church would be quite 
gone; instead of the floor would be a carpet of 
green grass, but the chancel, with its exquisite 
wood carving, would be intact, the high altar still 
in place. Not one but bore marks of German fire. 

Sometimes a village would be entirely deserted; 
silent, except for the birds; abandoned, as if for- 
ever. Again, in another, some of the inhabitants 
would have crept back, to live in cellars. Here 
and there we would see a little pile of tile, or 
brick, a few boards, as if someone had summoned 
courage to rebuild. What was saddest of all was 
to see old women poking in the ruins of what had 
once been their homes, trying to salvage some- 
thing that had belonged to the old life. Again 
and again I have seen that sad searching, not only 
in the Lorraine district, but in the Meuse district 
and in the ruined stretches of the Marne country. 

An uneven sort of devastation there in that 
Lorraine country, some villages entirely gone, 

143 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

others destroyed in part, others broken in part 
like Luneville or Baccarat. Other villages, almost 
within the hail of the voice, would be quite un- 
touched. When I asked the escorting officer what 
the German principle of destruction was he 
shrugged his shoulders. 

" Madame imposes a great task on me if she 
asks me to interpret German psychology," he 
said. " Perhaps the Germans made the excuse 
that in this town there was sniping, in that the 
civilians obeyed the orders not to shoot. For 
myself, I think that when a German officer was 
angry or tired or more than usually drunk, or 
irritable because he was not drunk, he gave orders 
to destroy, or closed his eyes when his men took 
matters in their own hands." 

All along I had been very chary of believing in 
German " atrocities." But in these ruined vil- 
lages here in Lorraine, on the Meuse and on the 
Marne, I saw, with my own eyes, the evidences 
of them; I heard people who had suffered telling 
their stories without excitement, dully, with no 
apparent rancor. Far more convincing they were 
than if they had raged, as they made tally of their 
wrongs. And as they talked they made me see 
more than their words : I felt the reality of Lord 
Bryce's report, and of the official statements of the 
cruelties committed by the Germans in Belgium 
and in Northern France. Not for me could the 
tales be dulled by the excuse, " But such things 
always happen in war." An explanation or an 

144 



THE BLACK TRAIL 

excuse never mitigates the kind of suffering those 
violated territories have endured. It can hold 
water no more than the civilian excuse for indus- 
trial atrocities, — " But that 's business." As I 
listened to the monotonously told wrongs of these 
suffering people I tried to think of the German 
side too. But the best I could say for them was 
this : no doubt there have been cases of atrocities 
committed by our Allies, but they have been spo- 
radic; whereas in the case of the Germans the 
frightfulness has been a consistent policy and it 
is only sporadic cases we find of Germans who 
would have been glad, had they dared, to show 
mercy. 

Of all the devastated places I saw, I felt most 
pity for Gerbevillers, — the martyr town, the 
French call it. A very pretty place it must have 
been; residential, entirely, having no industries 
except a brewery. Hard by was the chateau of 
the Marquis de Lambertine, the pride of Gerbe- 
villers, and of the whole country roundabout. 
Some of the white houses had fruit trees trained 
against the walls, and all of the outlying fields 
were well tilled and prosperous. Now, except 
for the brewery and for an almshouse and the 
Mairie, the town is a tale of burned and gutted 
homes. On the broken foundations of a small 
hotel a man has built up a little place of piles and 
blocks which he calls " Cafe de Ritines" A 
woman has come back and has built a little wooden 
house on the remains of what was once her home. 

145 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

She sells postcards, and points with pride to her 
pump, which is undamaged. 

We met the heroine of Gerbevillers, Sister Julie. 
She it was who was the head of the almshouse. 
We sat in her little house with its dim old furni- 
ture and ancient pictures and listened to her tale 
of what she had seen and done, and looked at the 
Cross of the Legion of Honor which President 
Poincare himself pinned on her habit. She talked 
to us for two hours, giving us the full tragic his- 
tory of those black days that destroyed her town, 
and I think she liked to talk almost as well as we 
liked to listen. For, though no doubt Sister Julie 
must have known what her vocation was, still she 
has other gifts. She would have made an excel- 
lent actress. She sat on the edge of her chair, 
or strode up and down her little living-room, her 
face growing black with horror or contempt, droll 
with humor, fiery with triumph. As she changed 
her expression or made gestures, I saw Bavarian 
officers, German soldiers methodically setting fire 
to houses, soaring flames and murdered civilians. 
She is a little broad woman, whose plain strong 
face bears an expression of mingled spiritual exal- 
tation and peasant shrewdness. She is executive 
and masterful (I am afraid I would rather be her 
priest than one of her nuns) , and she is lovable, as 
the people of Gerbevillers can testify. 

" When the invasion of the Germans began," 
Sister Julie said, " I knew it would not do to keep 
my old men and women here. So I sent them 

146 



THE BLACK TRAIL 

away under the care of several of the nuns. Ah, 
I cannot tell you how sad it was to stand in the 
doorway here and watch those poor old crippled 
people going slowly and painfully up the street, 
crying, and turning around to look back at me ! 
For see, they had all lost their homes once already, 
— the places that had been their very own in 
youth or in middle age. They had come here to 
this house, and after a while it became home to 
them, and they were happy. And then, in old 
age, to be turned out — ah, it was pathetic. 

" But me, I knew I should not be idle; that 
there would be wounded men brought into the 
town whom I could nurse. So they were, and 
they all happened to be men from about this neigh- 
borhood. I had fifteen, some very badly wounded. 
But meantime there was the war at our very 
gates ! Two hundred French soldiers we had, 
and they determined to defend Gerbevillers as 
long as they could. 

" Ah, but they were magnificent ! You will 
understand, madame, that the Germans could only 
enter Gerbevillers in one way, — by crossing the 
bridge over the river here. There was also a 
ford, but they did not attempt that, though we sent 
three men to guard it. Perhaps their spies had 
overlooked that. But the bridge; our two hun- 
dred men carried machine guns down there, and 
they held back thousands of Germans. Yes, it is 
the truth! Thousands attempted that bridge all 
day long, and were rolled back on themselves. 

i47 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

We knew it could not last, for we heard that 
thirty thousand more Germans were marching up 
to Gerbevillers. But our soldiers fought on hour 
after hour. They meant to fight as long as they 
had ammunition, and they expected to die. 

" But they did not die. It was nightfall before 
their ammunition was exhausted. The Germans 
drew back to wait for the day, and our men 
slipped away. Not one of them killed. They 
went away by a quiet road on which there was but 
one German sentry. To escape they had to kill him. 

" Ah, and when the Germans poured in on Ger- 
bevillers next day ! Figure to yourself their rage 
at the trick that had been played on them. Their 
thousands held back by two hundred ! A French- 
man would have laughed at himself for that! 
Not these Boches. Gerbevillers must pay, — old 
men and women; mothers and children. They 
said, these Germans, that we civilians had shot 
their sentry, and that as a punishment they would 
burn our town. 

" Ah, I have no words to describe the horror 
of it," Sister Julie continued. " Down the street 
came four Bavarian officers, followed by their 
soldiers. In groups of ten those soldiers went 
to each house and ordered the inhabitants to come 
out. Sometimes, even as they spoke, they made 
their guns ready to shoot, and they did shoot help- 
less people on their own doorsteps. Again they 
let the people pass, and the poor creatures ran 
across the fields, half mad. Others would not 

148 



THE BLACK TRAIL 

come out of their houses, and went down to the 
cellars. But against the incendiary pastilles those 
Germans threw into the houses, the cellars were no 
protection. Those poor people were burned alive. 

" Such sounds, — the roaring of flames, the 
shouting of the soldiers, the crying of the people. 
I was sitting with my wounded soldiers, but I went 
out into the street to meet those Bavarian officers. 
They seemed very tall, and I, as you see, am little, 
but I was not afraid of them. I was enraged, and 
I said to them, 

" ' I forbid this. You shall not burn my house. 
Why do you do this barbarous thing to Gerbe- 
villers ! ' 

" I think that already the Germans were shrink- 
ing from that word ' barbarian/ for the tallest of 
the Bavarians said, 

" ' We are not barbarians.' 

" I pointed to the burning houses, and, because 
I am one to say what I think, I said, 

'" What do you call this?' 

" I thought perhaps he would kill me, but he 
only frowned in a ferocious, ridiculous German 
way, and said, 

" ' Woman, in your house you are concealing 
spies.' 

" ' In my house,' I said, ' there are only a few 
grievously wounded French soldiers.' 

" Those great brutes of Bavarians did not be- 
lieve me ! They ran into my house. But I, for 
all that I am old, I am nimble, too. I entered first, 

149 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

I assure you. I ran into the room where my fifteen 
wounded men were. The largest officer drew his 
sabre, and he thrust at the throat of the poor 
boy nearest him. But I put my hands on that 
boy's throat, and the point of the sabre grazed 
them. Ah, what a moment! I expected nothing 
but death ! But what could I do ? I had to pro- 
tect that soldier of France." 

We were breathless! Through her speaking 
face, her gestures, her words, we saw the picture. 

" So," went on Sister Julie, " I said to that 
officer, 

" ' I will make a bargain with you. Let my 
wounded men alone, and I will nurse your Ger- 
man soldiers when they are wounded, — for 
wounded they will surely be, if they march further 
into our France. ' 

" So," concluded Sister Julie, " we struck that 
bargain, and those officers went out, and very glad 
indeed I was to see their backs. My poor soldiers 
had been so afraid, — for the wounded are afraid 
of death as men in the trenches are not. But they 
dragged their poor bodies upright, and they said 
to me, 

" ' Ah, it was a very bad quarter of an hour, 
Sister, but thanks to you, we are safe ! ' " 

How she made us see it all, — the violent Bava- 
rians, the trembling wounded men, remembering 
their manners, her own unrepressed wrath and pity ! 

" Ah, those villains! " she said. " Those Ger- 
mans ! Even when their officers gave orders that 

150 



THE BLACK TRAIL 

they were not to burn my house, they did their 
best in another direction. The fire had died down 
in a house opposite, and the walls were spared. 
That did not please a party of drunken Boches, 
no ! There they stood, drinking our wine. They 
would knock the necks off each bottle and drain 
it in a long draught, so ! The thought struck them 
to set that house once more in flames. Me, I saw 
them at it, and I went over to them, and I said, 

" ' How dare you disobey your orders, and set 
on fire a house that may destroy my house ! ' 

" I knew enough German to tell them what I 
thought of them, and I made them come into my 
kitchen and carry over tubs of water till they put 
out the flames they had started." 

We fell into gales of laughter. We could see 
those Germans goose-stepping away from the in- 
trepid old lady, falling over each other in their 
efforts to obey her. There must have been in her 
a strain of authority which appealed to the Ger- 
man soldiers, because, later on, she cowed them 
again. That night she left her sick men, took two 
women to help, and went to a stable where horses 
and cows had been burned alive. She cut off such 
of their flesh as was usable, carried it home, and 
began to make a stew of it. Led by the odor, the 
German soldiers flocked to her door, demanding 
the food. To all of them she said, 

" Out of here ! This food is not for you, but 
for these starving civilians in the fields there, 
whose houses you have burned." 

151 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

But there were others in Gerbevillers who did 
not fare so well as brave Sister Julie. Such sad 
stories as we heard. There was one mother whose 
husband had been killed in Alsace, and whose 
only child, a thirteen-year-old boy, the Germans 
hanged before her eyes. She cut the rope herself. 
She says he still breathed, but breathing or not, 
the Germans refused to let her take away his 
body. There was the boy of fifteen, shot as he 
ran towards his home. There were stories of this 
old man taken to Germany a prisoner, that girl 
hurried into the river, this man dragged away 
from the smouldering house where were the 
burned bodies of his parents. Above all, there 
was the story of the fifteen old men. Sister Julie's 
voice broke as she told of them. 

" Ah, those brave old men," she said, her flash- 
ing dark eyes misty, " our patriarchs, they were. 
And this — this is all that is left of them ! " 

We saw a photograph of fifteen old men, 
lying, in groups of five, in the long grass, under 
the trees. Their trousers had been unbuttoned, 
— the sort of insult the Germans seem to like to 
show people who they think can be especially hurt 
through infringement of their personal dignity. 
There they lay, lax and huddled, these old men 
who had been chosen as the chief sacrifice to 
German wrath. 

"Cruel! " cried Sister Julie. "This was the 
manner of their death. The Germans marched 
them out under that tree. An officer sat a little 

152 



THE BLACK TRAIL 

way off at a table in the sunshine, drinking the 
wine that had been stolen from our cellars. He 
ordered that those old men should be shot in 
groups of five. They were drawn up into three 
groups, and the Germans were drawn up before 
them, their rifles ready. The officer was to give 
the signal for the shooting. This was his method : 
when he took up his glass to drink for the first 
time, five were shot; when he drank for the sec- 
ond time, five more ; the third time, five more. Ah, 
the cruelty of that! The way he dallied over his 
wine, — our wine ! The suspense of those old 
brave ones ! There was one of them who died as 
he was rolling a cigarette; they could not show 
fear, our men of Gerbevillers ! But for us — to 
see those brave old bodies. And for days 
after we would find patches of their gray hair 
against the wall behind them — ! Ah, it was 
terrible ! Three weeks it was before the Ger- 
mans went away ! three weeks, that they were our 
masters ! 

" Me, they constantly sent for to go to the 
Mairie, where they had their headquarters. They 
questioned me; it took all my skill to answer the 
questions in a way to satisfy both myself and 
them. I told them nothing that could harm 
France. Every time I left the house my poor 
wounded boys would cry after me. They were 
afraid to be without me. It is so with the badly 
wounded; in their nerves they are as little 
children." 

153 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

" Tell me, Sister," I said, " did German 
wounded come and did you nurse them? " 

Sister Julie pursed her strong mouth and 
tapped her hand on the oilcloth-covered table. 
Luckily for my self-control she did not raise her 
eyes as she said, 

"Ah, yes, but, madame, I found that I hated 
them. This distressed me, so I went to my con- 
fessor and asked him if this hatred was a sin. 

" ' My daughter,' he said, ' if this is personal 
hate, it is wrong; but if it is national hate, it is 
right.' 

" So," concluded Sister Julie, naively, " I called 
it national hate! " 

It was quite dark when we left Sister Julie's 
little house. We picked our way slowly along the 
muddy road, between the dark broken walls of 
Gerbevillers, behind which were none of the little 
lights of home. We wondered if there could be, 
ever again. And then, as we turned into the road 
towards Nancy, we came upon a pair of lovers, 
walking :n the moonlight. They were careless of 
us; they were careless of the ruins about them. 
All they saw was their own love, their own hope. 
Looking at them, one drew the comfort that some 
day, when the griefs of this generation are past, 
others, to whom the war will be only a dramatic 
tale, will build new homes on the ruins of Lor- 
raine, and they will build with a faith and a secur- 
ity which we do not know. 



i54 



CHAPTER X 

The Fostering Hands 

Poor, war-racked human beings have the same 
instinct as Bruce's spider : they want to rebuild. 
Humanly, spiritually, materially, they want to 
weave for themselves a new tapestry of life, of 
background, of habits. Marcelline put this into 
words for me one day, — black-browed, imperious 
Marcelline with the deep eyes and the mocking 
mouth. I had seen her several times in a creche 
I had visited where she was helping take care of 
the children of soldiers' wives or widows, em- 
ployed by the day. Marcelline was not in charge ; 
and the woman who was her superior gave her the 
scrub work to do, was curt with her. This I had 
observed and also the curve of Marcelline's proud 
mouth, half sad, half scornful. One of the chil- 
dren in the creche was hers, — a radiant vigorous 
boy, with strongly curling auburn hair and blue, 
lustrous eyes. 

One morning I arrived early at the creche. 
Marcelline, her own child in her arms, stood at 
the entrance trying volubly and energetically to 
induce a girl to enter with her. This girl stood 
with her head drooping, holding loosely in her 
arms a little anaemic child. 

"Ah, qa } this imbecile," cried Marcelline, as 
i55 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

I joined them, " she will not come in; she is afraid 
they will turn their backs on her, will give her 
little one a cold welcome. I tell you, Marie, they 
are proud to welcome the child of a soldier of 
France. Tell her so, madame. Perhaps she will 
believe you. Tell her that because she forgot the 
priest no one is going to be hard on her. You, 
but you are a coward, Marie ! You had better 
slip down to the Midi, where no one knows you, 
and pretend that you are a widow. Ah! you, 
Marie ! " she added, clenching her hands. " Your 
soldier is alive yet ! He will come back. But my 
Jacques, — he lies out there, and for all I know 
the Germans march over the rags of his body — " 

Her voice broke, and abruptly she entered the 
creche. I told Marie that times had changed 
since the war; that no one would be hard on her 
now; that the authorities would be glad to have 
children of the brave soldiers to make the new 
citizens of France; that doubtless her soldier 
would come back and marry her. So I persuaded 
her to enter. While she stood timidly before the 
matron, answering the questions put to her, I 
joined Marcelline, who was receiving the babies 
as their mothers brought them in. I think Mar- 
celline understood my sympathy for her, but she 
threw her head back and smiled. There was cour- 
age and defiance and triumph in that smile. Then 
she put her hand in mine. 

" I do not want madame to think I am sorry," 
she said, " sorry that I have my little Jacques, — 

156 



THE FOSTERING HANDS 

through him his father has life again. He lies 
dead out there, and yet he goes on, in his son." 

She paused to receive the baby of a breathless 
young woman, late for her work in an adjoining 
ouvroir. 

" See, madame," she said, " this is the way it 
happened. We were bot'i in the Pas de Calais, 
in July, 1 9 14, Jacques and I, both strangers, a long 
way from home. We met, and we loved each other. 
We were to be married in the autumn. Then, 
— the war; before Jacques had to march to his 
regiment there were but a few days. We were not 
in our own parishes; there was the consent of our 
parents. We loved each other, and time was pass- 
ing. Nothing seemed to matter, except that time 
was passing and Jacques was going away — " 

Once more she busied herself with unwrapping 
a baby. When she spoke to me again her deep 
eyes were tearful. 

" Three little days, — no more, and he died out 
there on the Marne. Died before he was able 
to write me even one love-letter. But I have his 
words in my heart, madame. And I have Jacques. 
Ah, that brave little one — " 

There was a fresh group of babies to care for 
and it was some minutes before Marcelline could 
speak to me again. In the meantime her mind 
had evidently been flying forward, for she said, 

" There is a whisper that these babies of France, 
born outside wedlock, will be made legitimate. 
I hope that is true. If it is not true, — it may be 

157 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

that I will do what I bade Marie do, — go to 
some place where I am not known and take a 
married name. Perhaps to America, madame; 
who knows ? For the long happy life my man did 
not have my little Jacques shall have. No shadow, 
no trouble that I can hold away will come near that 
little one. Madame, — I feel such a power in 
me ! I thought my man could not die, because I 
felt so strong. He died, — but my strength will 
make for my little one. Hah ! I shall be able to 
guard him ! " 

Brave Marcelline, already she was rebuilding 
her house of life. And everywhere I could see the 
process of rebuilding going on. The fighting 
nations tearing one another to shreds, destroying, 
and behind the ranks, civilian organizations and 
individuals doing their best to repair. Blind 
soldiers and mutilated soldiers being taught new 
trades, that, out of the fragments left of them- 
selves, they might still give something to the 
world, and get back something in return. Refu- 
gees being sheltered here and there, new homes 
and new employment found for them. Widows 
who had never worked with their hands being 
shown how to be self-supporting; fatherless chil- 
dren being given a new family life, — sometimes 
with middle-aged couples who had lost their sons 
in the war, and who were urged to bring up an- 
other family for their own sakes and for the sake 
of France. 

The white flame of courage in the souls of the 
158 



THE FOSTERING HANDS 

French ! They must live, must work, must hope, 
must find what content they can for themselves, 
must give whatever happiness is possible to the 
next generation. Everywhere in France I saw 
this sort of bravery. I think it struck me most 
forcibly among the people whose homes had been 
battered down or burned, in the regions of the 
Marne, of the Meuse, and of Lorraine. For they 
had more to get back than other people in France. 
They had the task not only of spiritual reconstruc- 
tion, but of the rebuilding of their houses and 
their blasted fortunes. 

I saw the courage of those people symbolized 
in the attitude of Madame Lecontier. For at last 
I plucked up heart to go to the home of the 
Lecontiers. I knew their life would be changed; 
how else, with four sons of military age? But 
many villages in the region of the Marne had 
escaped. Why not their village? Many houses 
in a bombarded village escape; why not theirs? 

By the time I found them their suffering had 
become to me only like that of thousands of others. 
Not impersonal, but part of a deep general woe. 
Of their home was left only a cairn of fallen 
stones, and the splintered trunks of the two pop- 
lars. Madame and the little boy and girl were 
there. They had come creeping back to see if 
they could till their ground, because that was the 
best way to help France. The father? Madame 
showed me the bit of wall against which he had 
been shot. The four grown sons ? One dead, one 

159 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

missing, two prisoners in Germany. The older 
daughter, that lovely creature, — madame only 
wept when I asked for her. Then she said, 
calmly, 

" You see how it is with us, madame? The 
happy past is gone. There is the present, in which 
we three may work for France. Good people are 
helping us rebuild our house. We shall manage." 

Poor, brave soul! for me she was one more 
mother of the many sorrows, one more noble 
proof of the will of France to live, to triumph. 

That was the first mention I heard of the re- 
building that is being done in certain devastated 
sections. My first view of it came as I was swept 
through the little town of Sommeilles. I was 
being " personally conducted " and was not sup- 
posed to stop between Bar-le-Duc and Chalons, 
but my pleading prevailed. 

At first sight, Sommeilles might be a synonym 
for the Biblical phrase, " the abomination of deso- 
lation " : orderly heaps and rows of fallen homes 
and, in one gently sloping street, fragments of the 
church and the town hall, almost facing each 
other. The church is a square ruin, with part of 
the tower in good order, including the face of the 
clock. The hour hand, which indicates nine, has 
safely borne, for over two years now, the nest of 
a sparrow. Of the town hall there remain four 
pillars, the doorway standing open behind them 
between broken flanks of wall, and above, the 
pediment and a few climbing sections of stone. 

160 



THE FOSTERING HANDS 

I had heard of Sommeilles as a prosperous 
community of little farmers. The county round 
about was so thickly inhabited that the proprie- 
tors did not live on their own land, but in the vil- 
lage, going out every day to their fields. Of a 
sudden, the war, the invasions, and the Germans 
burning the village because they declared the civil- 
ians had destroyed a bridge over which the French 
had just retreated. So determined were the Ger- 
mans not to leave stone upon stone in Sommeilles 
that they watched the destruction of each house, 
relighting any fire that happened to go out. 

Billows of broken houses; nothing whole, I 
thought, and I was about to go back to the motor 
when I spied a little wooden house, looking, in 
that place, curiously alien. It squatted, as if ten- 
tatively, beside a mass of fallen walls and chim- 
ney which had once been a home. Its walls were 
of pine, stained brown; its roof was of red tile. 
In the doorway stood a stout old woman in a very 
clean cap, with a checked apron, not so clean, over 
her black dress. She looked, if not happy, at least 
contented. She took me in, and showed me her 
two little rooms, — a kitchen and a bedroom. 
Somehow, she had made the inside look French. 
She talked very freely, telling the story that never 
loses its tragedy in France, because of its common- 
ness : a story of shock and bombardment and loss. 
Yet it was of the future that she spoke, and 
hopefully. 

" For I have a home, madame," she said; 
161 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

" those good English people called Friends, 
Quakers, they have built this house for me. 
When the Germans invaded we did not want to 
go. We are not like city people, madame, we 
who have our own bits of land. The officers of 
the army, — la ! la ! how they scold the women 
because they do not like to leave their homes, and 
because they run out to bring in the clothes off the 
line when a bombardment starts. 

" We people in Sommeilles, when the Germans 
went, we came back. There was nothing to live 
in but cellars. If a house could be patched up 
in any of these ruined villages it was done, and 
two or three families lived there together. There 
was no one in all France who could help us re- 
build our homes. But these kind people from 
England came to do what they could for us. They 
put up little sheds on the land, so the farmers could 
set in a new harvest. They gave us seed and 
clothes and furniture. For some of us, who could 
pay a little, they built these houses, and when my 
son came back from Verdun I was glad that I had 
a place for him. There were other men who came 
back from the front and had nothing, — no par- 
ents any more; no home. So it is — our crops 
have come back to us ; some day our men will come, 
when the Germans are beaten. Ah, they are in- 
deed the good friends, these Quakers! One of 
them is working below there! " 

I followed her pointing finger. Across a field 
and behind a hill of stones rose three blackened 

162 




In the doorway stood a stout old woman in a very clean cap 

"We people in Sommeilles, when the Germans went, we 
came back. There was nothing to live in but cellars" 



THE FOSTERING HANDS 

walls. A man was building a fourth wall of wood, 
and beams had been set across to support the roof. 
The man had his back to us. I nodded good-bye 
to the old woman, and approached him. He 
began singing before I reached him the favorite 
song of the British soldiers : The Long Trail. 

" There 's a long, long trail a-winding, 
Into the land of my dreams 
Where the nightingale is singing, 
And a white moon beams. 
There 's a long, long night of waiting, 
Until my dreams all come true, 
Till the day when I '11 be going down 
That long, long trail with you." 

The crooning tune sorted ill with his powerful 
strokes. 

" I wonder," I thought, " if he can be a con- 
scientious objector? " 

Hearing my footsteps, he glanced up. He had 
a good face, sweet and strong. Tall and broad, 
blue-eyed, straight in glance, he looked like a citi- 
zen any country might be glad to possess. If he 
were a conscientious objector, I decided he was 
neither a coward nor a weakling. We fell into 
talk; I asked questions, and he told me about the 
work in France of the society to which he belonged. 
Presently he talked of himself. 

" The matter of fighting, I take it," he said, 
" is a thing one settles with one's own conscience 
and not with the military authorities; neither with 
the tenets of one's formal religion. My two 

163 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

brothers, though Quakers, are fighting in France. 
I was conscripted and put in khaki. Like the 
other objectors, I refused to attend roll-call, was 
imprisoned, court-martialed, and again sent to 
prison for six months. I was asked if I would 
work for the government. I said I would do any 
work that did not mean directly pushing on the 
war. They let me choose this." 

He drove in a few nails, and, as I watched 
him, I thought of the court-martials of conscien- 
tious objectors which I had watched in Hounslow. 
I saw it again, — that square room in the bar- 
racks, soldiers on guard outside the door; inside, 
the court, composed of three British officers. Be- 
fore them, a prisoner in civilian clothes, standing 
between two soldier-police. Always, the charge 
read, and then a lance-corporal or sergeant to 
give testimony. Always the testimony ran in the 
same groove. " Sir, on the morning of the 
twentieth of September, I ordered Private Jones, 
etc." Sometimes Private Jones had the furtive 
face of a coward; sometimes he had the bewil- 
dered face of an idealist who has not thought 
out his problem; and occasionally he had the face 
of a man without fear. 

Painful sights, those court-martials, and equally 
so the tribunals, where men were trying to get 
exempted. As the Quaker with strong strokes 
built up the little French house, I thought of the 
scenes I had watched in London : the panelled 
court-rooms; the row of civilian judges; the mili- 

164 



THE FOSTERING HANDS 

tary prosecutor; the men in the witness stand, ask- 
ing not to serve at all, or else to have a few 
months' freedom before they need serve. There 
had been the tobacconist, a young man with a 
white strained face, who did not want to leave his 
little business just yet. The prosecutor asked 
why his wife could not run it. 

" Because," the man had replied hoarsely, " she 
is taking care of our little dying child, our only 
one. The doctor thinks he will die within two 
months. If you '11 give me two months I '11 serve 
the country, and glad to." 

He was given three. I remembered the thin 
boy, sick with jaundice, who asked exemption. As 
the prosecutor questioned him, his old bent 
mother crept up out of the audience, closer and 
closer to the boy, put her old clutching fingers on 
his arm, and whispered: " He was always a deli- 
cate boy, your honor." Six months for him. 

There was the pompous old gentleman, asking 
to have one man servant allowed him for his 
estate. " Before the war," he said, " I had nine- 
teen men-servants, indoor and outdoor. Now I 
have only this man left. For the rest, I permit 
myself to be waited on exclusively by women! " 
Gracious soul ! But I seemed to be the only per- 
son in the audience who wanted either to laugh 
at him or be indignant with him. He was allowed 
to keep his servant, — possibly because the man 
was, in any case, close to the age limit. 

I was seeing all this as the Quaker hammered 
165 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

nails in the wooden wall. Presently, watching his 
fine hands, I said, 

" I take it carpentry was your trade? " 

" No, I am — I was — a violinist ! I don't 
suppose I shall be able to play again. Work like 
this, in the winter especially, is crippling to the 
hands." 

I think he was glad to be paying the price of his 
career for the sake of his conscience. 

" You hold no brief for the conscientious ob- 
jector? " he asked. 

" I 'm afraid not. I 'm afraid I think that in 
these times, when so many men are giving up 
everything, a man ought to give up his conscience, 
and follow where his country points." 

He nodded, gravely, as if he had gone beyond 
caring to argue his side. 

" There are many of us here in Paris. Young 
men, — younger than I. I am thirty-eight. If 
you could hear them talking at night ! They feel 
that when the war is over they must make them- 
selves count, not only for peace, but for all sorts 
of good, for all kinds of civic righteousness. Not 
one but is ready to sacrifice himself, and all he has, 
to make a better world. They will give, one day, 
as freely as the soldiers here." 

Ah, but they will be tested by the temptations 
of time, of easy living. The soldier gives all he 
has in a few hard months. But we did not speak 
further on that point. He talked again of the 
Quakers, and I listened, convinced certainly of his 

1 66 



THE FOSTERING HANDS 

goodness and usefulness. The work of the 
Quakers in France has been done so quietly that 
many people have failed to realize its significance. 
Dr. Hilda Clark conceived the idea of helping in 
France. In November, 19 14, she took a group 
of thirty to Esternay on the Marne. The inten- 
tion was to act primarily as a sanitary corps, in 
preventing diseases. But by degrees they did 
more. They established a maternity hospital at 
Chalons. They began to repair houses. Gradu- 
ally their territory was widened, and their corps 
of workers was increased to about one hundred 
men and women. 

They would have been glad to rebuild the 
houses of stone if that had been possible. But to 
meet the urgent need, the only practicable plan 
was to build a number of wooden huts, that could 
be erected quickly. The prefects of the Marne 
and the Meuse agreed that the Quakers should 
purchase the materials, the cost of which would 
later be refunded by the departments. By ar- 
rangement with the departmental authorities, the 
occupiers pay a minimum rent until such time as 
they shall be able to pay the cost of the materials 
used from the indemnity which will be granted 
by the French government. The indemnity is 
only to be paid on condition that the money shall 
be spent on reconstruction or for agricultural im- 
plements. It may not be given in the form of 
cash. 

Steadily and energetically the members of the 
167 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

Friends War Victim Relief have been building. 
They have repaired where they could, putting 
wooden and tile roofs on partly demolished 
houses. Where they could not repair they have 
built afresh, always considering the needs of 
each family. They have given their labor free, 
but they have given more than that. They have 
had a strong moral effect on the dispirited com- 
munities, toiling cheerfully as they do, day after 
day. 

They have given the labor; they have given 
furniture and agricultural implements and seeds. 
In Troyes they are selling to refugees furniture 
and bedding at three-quarters of the cost price. 
They have a cottage hospital at Sermaize, a sani- 
tarium at Samoens in Haute-Savoie for children 
from the invaded districts who have been under- 
nourished, or whose nerves have suffered from 
bombardments. They have installed at Bettin- 
court a convalescent home for children in a chateau 
lent by the Countess de Morillot, and they have 
an ouvroir at Bar-le-Duc. Such deeps and shal- 
lows of life as they have come across, those gentle 
people who don't believe in making war ! There 
was the old man and woman at Sermaize who had 
escaped with a few clothes. They had lost their 
house, but they had their fields still. One of the 
Quaker doctors noticed that the old lady looked 
worried rather than despairing, much like some- 
one who had asked the wrong people to lunch to- 
gether or repeated gossip indiscreetly. 

1 68 



THE FOSTERING HANDS 

" Is there anything I can do for you," asked 
the doctor, " anything I could buy you? " 

The old woman cast a glance over her shoulder 
and whispered, 

" Ah, Mademoiselle Doctor, if you would ! We 
had fifteen minutes before the Germans came, 
and my husband told me to pack some of our 
clothes. I did, but I forgot his Sunday waistcoat. 
He has not spoken to me since. If Mademoiselle 
could but buy him a waistcoat — " 

A flamboyant waistcoat was bought, and ami- 
cable family relations were restored. 

Then there was the story of another couple who 
had driven behind their little mare Titine for 
sixty miles before the Germans, arriving at Ser- 
maize. After a while their store of money gave 
out, and it seemed as if they would have to sell 
the mare. 

" If only we need not sell Titine ! " the old 
woman said; " if we could rent her to some kind 
person near here, so we could watch over her. 
She is like one of our family, is Titine. When 
the Germans came she seemed to know it. She 
was so good, so brave. She did not ask for food; 
she took the water, which was all we had to give 
her, as thankfully as if it were food. We could 
bear having lost our home, if only we could keep 
Titine." 

Arrangements were made so that they were able 
to keep Titine, who does ploughing and various 
farm jobs in the fields about Sermaize. 

169 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

Sermaize-les-Bains is perhaps the most shining 
example of what the Quakers have accomplished. 
Before the war it had about twenty-seven hundred 
inhabitants. It was a summer resort; it also had 
a beet-sugar factory. The factory the Germans 
spared, and a flimsy wooden hotel near the springs. 
The rest of the town they put to the flame. When 
the Quakers came they found the people who had 
not run away living in the hotel, in the most in- 
sanitary and pitiable of conditions. They were 
half sick and half stupefied with misery. Now, 
rising from the ruins of Sermaize, which no one 
has had time to clear away, are little brick houses, 
like the cottages of English workmen, from which 
a hopeful people go out to their work in the fields 
and the factory. All but five hundred of the orig- 
inal inhabitants are back, and of the five hundred 
many are in the trenches. " The City of the Good 
Friends," it has been named. 

There is one village I visited in France which 
is being rebuilt as nearly as possible as it used to 
be. This rebuilding is the gift of a California 
family who asked Miss Daisy Polk to select a 
village and take charge of its reconstruction. 
Miss Polk had been working in France since the 
beginning of the war and had her background 
well established. She had already won the name 
of " Mademoiselle Toute Suite " because she 
always insisted on everything being done " at 
once." 

She chose little Vitremont, of Lorraine. It had 
170 



THE FOSTERING HANDS 

been a typical Lorraine village, set in pleasant 
rolling country, consisting of some sixty houses, 
with their little gardens, fruit-trees, and, beyond, 
the farmers' fields. 

It had a good church, a green well-kept ceme- 
tery, with a handsome cross in the centre. Of 
inhabitants, at the time of the German invasion, 
there were some two hundred and sixty-five. 
When that sinister gray wave rolled into Vitre- 
mont it broke upon the little cemetery. For three 
days on that spot there was the bitterest sort of 
fighting, the Germans especially bombarding the 
cross. Seven battles were fought, but the Ger- 
mans were temporarily victorious. They burned 
thirty-six houses and the church. It is odd (or 
perhaps it is significant) that in these little vil- 
lages they spared breweries or factories or the 
Maine, but never the church. 

" Ah, ha, but they were fierce, those Germans," 
said old Pere Barbier; "they seized me. ' You 
are our cook,' they told me. ' Now get us bread.' 
My God, what to do, I had no bread. ' Gentle- 
men, I have no bread,' I said. ' We shall kill you 
if you don't get bread,' they told me. Madame, 
it was terrible ! No bread ! No one to ask for 
bread; my neighbors evacuating! I took a stone, 
and I killed two chickens, running. I cut off their 
heads. I got three dozen eggs and made an ome- 
lette. I gave them that tender chicken, that deli- 
cious omelette, and some Lorraine beer. When 
they had eaten I said, ' Gentlemen, there is no 

171 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

bread. I swear it, but I can make you another 
omelette.' And the captain said, ' Because of that 
omelette we have eaten, you shall not die ! ' 

Meanwhile the Germans burned most of the 
houses and, except for a few people who hid in 
cellars, little Vitremont was deserted. The old 
market-women who used to sell their vegetables 
in Luneville had fled there for sanctuary, — and 
eight of them were killed there by a German shell. 
The men were mobilized, the fields remained 
untilled. 

So Vitremont stood when " Mademoiselle 
Toute Suite " chose it for rehabilitation. What 
a joy to her it must have been to take up. the 
broken threads of the lives of those people and 
weave them together! One by one, under her 
efforts, they crept back. She employed the old 
men and the boys of the village in clearing away 
debris and in rebuilding. The women tilled the 
fields. Each new house reproduced the ruined one 
it replaced almost exactly. When the new Vitre- 
mont is fully rebuilt, it will be old Vitremont 
brought back to life again. At present, if the 
forty men still alive in the trenches are counted, 
Vitremont numbers one hundred and eighty 
persons. 

It was when the church was rebuilt, roof on, 
and stained-glass windows in, that the life of the 
people in Vitremont seemed really centralized. 
There the Christmas mass was said. Heretofore, 
the masses had been held in Antoine's house, and 

172 



THE FOSTERING HANDS 

it was not large enough for all the people to enter 
who wanted to say their prayers for the soldiers. 
But that Christmas mass, in a church large enough 
for the people of Vitremont thrice over! And 
the christening of the first baby born since the 
war! 

Miss Polk gives these people the love that takes 
account of little things. She knew what the look 
of the soldier meant who had gone away when 
his little girl was a baby in arms, and had returned 
to find her able to talk and to walk. When the 
first anniversary mass was said in memory of the 
eight old women of Vitremont who had been 
killed in Luneville, Miss Polk brought a bead 
wreath for the grave of each, — something be- 
yond the purses of their relatives. She it is who 
soothes the nerves of some of the children, when 
the memory of the Germans comes back to terrify 
them, and they cower and hide their faces. If a 
soldier is killed or wounded or made prisoner, 
Miss Polk is the one to whom the sad relatives 
go for solace. Every minute of her time is taken 
in working in Vitremont, and often, when she 
should be asleep, she is writing letters to stimulate 
the rebuilding of other villages. 

That will come. To the fostering hands 
already in service others will be added. When 
I first went through those invaded regions I 
thought of them as dark twilight places where the 
ghosts of little dead children wandered, looking 
for their parents and for their homes, where the 

i73 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

ghosts of soldiers walked, asking for more life, 
where the sad voices of living young girls called 
for the lovers they shall never find. But now, in 
spite of those men in blue who daily die and are 
wounded, I see those ravaged regions as a place 
where hope shall fulfil its promise, even as a child 
becomes a man. 



174 



CHAPTER XI 

The Good Little Pawn 

T had gone to Annemasse, in Haute-Savoie, to 
■■- meet some of the twenty-five thousand in- 
habitants of northern France whom the Germans, 
because they could no longer feed them, were send- 
ing down to unoccupied France. Since I was only 
four miles from Switzerland, I asked the prefect 
of Annemasse for a permit to cross the border. 
I boarded a neat tram that did not look at all like 
an international affair, carrying my camera and, 
in my plump handbag, some notes I had taken in 
Annemasse. I had a seat beside a much tailored 
lady; never have I seen so many buttons as she 
sported : a double row on her long coat and rows 
on her dress. In fluent English she instructed me 
as to the ways of the officials on the Swiss border. 

" You 're American," she said; " do you know 
that you can't take gold out of France, or silver? " 

" I did n't know about the silver, but I think 
I Ve only a franc or two ; I just paid my hotel bill 
in silver," I said. 

She looked at me as if she thought I had gone 
mad. 

" Did n't the patron die when you paid him in 
silver? " 

"He did look rather grateful, but I thought 
175 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

that was just his good manners. I did notice that 
every shopkeeper in Annemasse offers you paper, 
even five-cent bits of paper." 

We got out of the tram at the frontier. On the 
French side was an arch, decorated with tricolor. 
Beyond were half a dozen French gendarmes, 
and on the other side half a dozen Swiss. As we 
crowded into the little customs building my com- 
panion whispered, 

" If you have more than two francs of silver, 
I 'd advise you to swallow it. Open your purse; 
they like you to be ready and to seem innocent, in 
case of smuggling." 

Naturally I began to feel guilty. The arm of 
an official forced the crowd back. I was let in 
with my companion and a stout man. A gen- 
darme felt the man's pockets and whatever por- 
tion of him seemed padded. He was released, 
and sent to a table where three inspectors exam- 
ined his passport. The lady followed. The gen- 
darme glanced at my handbag and my anxiously 
innocent face. He passed me on to the three in- 
spectors. The first one asked for my permit; the 
second one scrutinized it; the third, glancing at my 
camera and notes, all but ate that permit. They 
asked me where I was born, what my nationality 
was, where I was going, and why. Then they 
asked me to step into a private room. There a 
sympathetic lady met me and opened my bag. 
She shook out everything that was in it, — and 
laid aside the notes. She also retained my camera. 

176 



THE GOOD LITTLE PAWN 

" Your hat," she said, " is rather high, mad- 
ame. Of course — " 

I smiled, and took it off. She poked it very 
thoroughly. She then tested my shoes. By this 
time I was amused, and was looking as genuinely 
innocent as I was. A French officer entered, and 
asked me for my history and inmost thoughts. 

" Ah, but these notes," he said; "we must be 
careful. Could madame give us any further 
proof—" 

I searched frantically in my bag. By good luck 
I found the official permit from the Maison de la 
Presse, stamped with the record of the various 
places I had visited in the war zone. 

"Ah, I am desolated to have detained 
madame! " said the officer. Then he added, to 
the inspectors leaning forward from their table 
to see a possible spy, " This lady is safe to pass." 

I wished to show that I appreciated his discern- 
ment, and asked to leave my notes and camera till 
I should be returning. This pleased the inspec- 
tors. I then departed, to meet the curious eyes 
of the tram-full of waiting people. 

"Ah," said my late companion; "I won- 
dered. You never can tell about people, and the 
last time I came over I sat beside a woman that 
was detained here and sent back, under suspicion 
of being a spy. The time before, I was just a 
few seats behind a man who was found to have 
in his shoes information about the new search- 
lights and anti-air-craft guns outside Paris. Also 

177 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

these customs officers are very suspicious about 
smuggling. They are especially likely to be strict 
after someone has slipped across." 

"T should n't think anyone would have a chance 
to slip across," I said, with a vivid memory of 
having counted some dozen French and Swiss 
gendarmes, all armed, guarding the border. 

" Oh, sometimes a French soldier wants a day's 
holiday in Geneva, and he 's not got a pass. He 
will engage a gendarme in talk, and then run past 
him. The French are good enough runners, and 
by the time the gendarme is ready to fire the 
French soldier is laughing across the border. 
Then when he returns he gives the gendarme a few 
cigarettes. But they hear of it in the customs and 
are very strict for a day or two." 

I began to talk of Swiss embroidery, and the 
lady volunteered to show me, in Geneva, a shop 
where the best could be bought. This she did, 
and presently I understood why the people in 
Annemasse clung to their silver. When I was 
paying in paper for my purchases I found that the 
exchange I had to lose was almost three francs in 
every twenty ! In vain I offered English paper. 

" Ah, we must live, we Swiss," said the shop- 
keeper, who was really doing pretty well as it was 
with the prices, f and English money may have 
become worthless over night. How do we know 
in these days? " 

My companion, meanwhile, was ready to pay 
for her purchases. She did not offer silver. Very 

178 



THE GOOD LITTLE PAWN 

placidly she cut off one of the large cloth buttons 
from her coat, ripped off the cloth top, and re- 
vealed a ten-dollar gold piece! 

" It 's a lot of trouble to cover them, but it 's 
worth it," she said calmly. " The minute you 
were detained I felt quite comfortable. I knew 
they would not trouble me. Now I can buy all 
I want to, and bank the rest of the gold here in 
Geneva! " 

Later, I found out how strictly Switzerland 
tries to guard against smuggling. She must be 
strict, because she has, to preserve her neutrality. 
She makes munitions for the Allies, who send in 
their own raw materials to certain firms. Then 
the Allies watch to see that none of these muni- 
tions are smuggled into Germany. The Swiss 
make aluminum for the Zeppelins, and in return 
for this, Germany allows Switzerland a certain 
amount of steel, but sees to it that none of it goes 
to the firms that are working for the Allies. She 
does not trust to the precautionary measures of 
Switzerland. 

Meanwhile, the smuggling goes on. Many of 
the commodities are sent across at night by boat, 
over Lake Constance. The searchlights on the 
Swiss shore are not numerous, and a nimble little 
boat may easily escape them; and if not, the shots 
that pursue her. Whatever casualties there may 
be are not advertised. Often men are arrested 
on the frontier near Basle at night for trying to 
drive into Germany noiseless, well-filled carts. 

179 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

The penalty for capture is heavy, but the rewards 
of success are even more considerable. There are 
also, for those who wish to be comparatively safe, 
innumerable petty ways of getting things through, 
such as the false bottoms of trunks and heavily 
padded overcoats. People who cross frequently 
are suspected and searched. One lady who often 
travelled by way of Basle into Germany was ex- 
amined on her final trip and was found to be 
wearing a corset and two petticoats made entirely 
of rubber. Just after big consignments of oil 
come from Italy the Swiss authorities are un- 
usually vigilant. 

There is not so much smuggling between France 
and Switzerland as between Switzerland and Ger- 
many. Not long since a piano going to France 
was examined and found to be full of saccharine. 
But generally the smuggling is petty. Old market- 
women from Haute-Savoie will try to smuggle in 
more butter than the law allows, in order to earn 
a little more to buy comforts for their sons at the 
front. Or perhaps some Swiss woman with a sick 
child will go across the line for eggs and will 
try to carry back more than she should. Never- 
theless, in spite of all precautions, there are ways 
of getting food and supplies into Germany; for 
one thing, these can, by a little camouflage, be sent 
by mail, as presents. 

But of all this I was ignorant when I stepped off 
the train into the beautiful serene city of Geneva ! 
How delightful it was to walk down the rue du 

1 80 



THE GOOD LITTLE PAWN 

Mont Blanc, to see the beautiful plane trees, the 
graceful bridges, and the green water of the lake, 
all such a fit setting for happiness. At first, after 
the warlike environment of England and France, 
I enjoyed breathing the atmosphere of a neutral 
country. But when I began to pass on the wide 
street German deserters and spies, I knew I was 
not neutral and that, until our cause is won, I pre- 
ferred a warlike environment. 

Geneva gave me more of a cosmopolitan feel- 
ing even than going into the Ritz in Paris. In 
the Ritz are to be found officers from all the Allied 
nations. But in Geneva I passed Germans and 
French, Austrians and Italians, English and 
Greeks and Rumanians. It was good for the 
risibles to watch a French and a German officer, 
passing shoulder to shoulder, each studiously 
unaware of the other, but at the same time not 
yielding an inch of the pavement. So rich was 
the life on the pavement, that at first I did not 
watch the life in the shops. But when I did, I 
got my first intimation of what Switzerland is 
undergoing. Except that she does not lose her 
soldiers, she is suffering as much as if she were at 
war. All her available men are mobilized, pro- 
fessions and industries are suffering heavily, and 
her prices have gone up enormously. 

Switzerland is just a pawn. It is not fanciful 
to say that until the war came there were thou- 
sands of intelligent and patriotic Swiss who 
thought their country was as safe and independent 

181 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

as she was democratic, and who have learned, in 
humiliation, to think otherwise. The case was 
first put for me in precise English by a little old 
man in a sort of musical shop, — the kind of 
place where you enter and sit on a chair, which 
straightway begins to play in muffled, silvery 
tones the Merry Widow Waltz, and if you won't 
get up follows, after a discreet pause, with 
some one-step. You pick up a gold-crested goblet 
and a cigar-box, and one plays the Beautiful 
Blue Danube, while the other swings into the 
Marseillaise (the shop being, like Switzerland, 
neutral). The old man was gnarled and brown- 
skinned and white-headed, a good deal like one of 
the brown Switzerland hills with snow on it. 

"Since October, 191 6, we've only sold seven 
dollars' worth," he said; " nobody is buying any- 
thing any more. All up and down this street you '11 
find curio shops and jewelry shops shutting up. 
Our export trade to England has stopped. No- 
body comes in here except to borrow a match or 
ask the time. People don't even turn to look in 
the windows any more. I need not dust or clean 
except out of respect to the stock. 

" So I have had much time to think, and what 
I have been thinking is that we were as vain as 
some beautiful girl with a good rich home and 
plenty of lovers, or maybe a husband that spoiled 
her, and everybody praising her. It would be 
natural for such a girl to believe in her own 
power and in nothing else, especially in nothing 

182 



THE GOOD LITTLE PAWN 

evil. She could not believe that some accident 
could blast her good looks, or take away her 
lovers or her money; or that death could come. 

" That 's the way with Switzerland. We 've 
lived mostly on the tourists, — people of the one 
class that come for the winter sports and moun- 
tain-climbing. I heard an American lady say once 
that they were super-tourists, people of the sophis- 
ticated class, that were hardly aware they were 
travelling. There were the sick people, too, the 
consumptives and the neurasthenics. Then we 
had the other class who came mostly in the sum- 
mer and mostly for the first time, just frankly 
tourists, liking to be in Switzerland and to take 
away souvenirs. 

" Now, you Ve heard travellers talk a good 
deal, but, allowing perhaps for a little complaint 
at the size of the hotel bills, particularly in the 
mountains, did you ever hear them say anything 
but pleasant things about Switzerland? I don't 
think you did. There 's something in the air 
here, mellow, would you say? nerve-soothing, too; 
it makes people easy in their minds, comfortable, 
and inclined to praise. You '11 find that travellers 
are just as enthusiastic about Switzerland as they 
are about Italy; it 's a different kind of beauty, but 
just as appealing. Americans feel it, and then 
they have a sympathy for us because we are a 
republic. I heard a man say that there was as 
little graft in Switzerland as there was in America 
when she was a little young country. 

183 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

" There you have it. We were liked and 
praised, and there were plenty of us who believed 
all we heard about ourselves and never thought 
anything could change, any more than a young 
soldier believes he can be killed; it will be his 
neighbor, not himself. Then came the war, — 
and we saw what happened to Belgium. Yes, 
there we were all, reading the papers and seeing 
what happened to Belgium and little Luxembourg, 
but we would n't face the fact that such a thing 
could happen to us. No, what we said to one an- 
other was, — ' Poor Belgium; it is as well we are 
situated where we are.' Or, 'Poor Belgium; if 
only her soldiers were as good shots as ours, and 
as well drilled, perhaps Germany would have 
hesitated before she began to march through!' 
We said that, though already we had begun to 
hear of great guns, one shell from which could 
ruin the strongest fort ever built. And even pretty 
wise men said, ' Of course we could not have 
beaten Germany, but we could have held her back 
so long that she would have made far less head- 
way than she did by the way she chose.' As I sit 
here alone and think, the conceit of little countries 
and little human beings could make me laugh, — 
or cry ! 

" But these months of war have taught us some- 
thing. Even yet, with all our suffering, we don't 
quite like to face the facts. What some of us 
say is, ' For real independence, a country needs 
a seaport.' But Belgium had Antwerp, and what 

184 



THE GOOD LITTLE PAWN 

good did it do her ? The facts are these : a country, 
to be safe, must have plenty of territory and cattle 
and money and seaports and forts and soldiers; if 
it lacks soldiers and forts it has to have a good 
barrier, like the Atlantic Ocean, that keeps Amer- 
ica fairly safe. A small country, with no sea- 
ports, little cultivatable ground, dependent on 
other lands and other peoples for her living, with 
only enough soldiers to supply a few good mas- 
sacres, — such a nation may be a republic, may be 
the most democratic nation in the world, — but 
she is not free. Compared to a country of the 
first sort, she is like a pigmy who is safe until he 
has to compete physically with a giant. 

" Neutral we are, for neutral we must be. But 
however we talk, we have learned to know our 
weakness." 

Poor little Switzerland, proud of her hotels, her 
scenery, her sports, her manufactures, and her 
population of four and a half millions. Why 
should she have seen her limitations clearly? So 
long as she could raise those hardy annuals, the 
tourists, she could live in comfort. She could 
feed them and herself by the help of four neigh- 
boring nations. The treaty of Turin permitted 
her to get from Haute-Savoie milk, butter, eggs, 
and vegetables, Germany supplied her with coal 
and iron. When the war came Switzerland made 
prohibition against certain imports and exports, 
— and got into difficulties with the belligerent 
powers. The trouble started with the question of 

185 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

copper and rubber. The Allies, to make the 
blockade against Germany increasingly effect- 
ive, asked that Switzerland should guaran- 
tee that whatever supplies they sent should 
not get into Germany or Austria. Switzerland 
consented. 

" Very well, madame," said Germany, " what 
is sauce for the goose is certainly sauce for the 
gander. Where do you expect to get your coal 
this winter while we are engaged in pulverizing 
the Allies? And your iron?" 

A rhetorical question, for the Allies could not 
supply the little country with coal. 

" For reasons into which we need not enter," 
said Germany, " our cattle supply is short. If you 
want coal you must hand over your cattle." 

That transfer had to be made, with the result 
that milk and cream and butter have become very 
dear in Switzerland, and sometimes simply cannot 
be had at all. To be sure, there was the treaty 
with Haute-Savoie, but Haute-Savoie needed her 
food for France. Result: high prices and smug- 
gling and deprivation. Germany is sending Switz- 
erland a minimum amount of coal, on the grounds 
that she cannot furnish transportation. France, 
too, is hampered as to transportation, and tons of 
food which Switzerland has bought from America 
and paid for are lying on French docks. Who- 
ever enters Switzerland discovers at once that 
however the sympathies of individuals may lean, 
as a nation, the country will resist invasion from 

1 86 



THE GOOD LITTLE PAWN 

any other country. The second discovery is that 
her pro-German sentiment is lessening. 

Berne, as well as Zurich, Lausanne, and 
Geneva, are strong centres for German propo- 
ganda. It is carried on not only by newspapers 
and magazines, but by advertisements and private 
letters, by bribes and by threats. And many clear- 
sighted Swiss people wonder why the French have 
relatively little propaganda and why the English 
have practically none. 

As Berne is the seat of the Swiss government, it 
is the headquarters for officials, politicians, and 
the commercial and diplomatic spies. The mili- 
tary spies are to be found chiefly in Basle and 
Zurich and Geneva. Many of them are deserters, 
who can never go back to their own country. The 
Swiss treat them none too politely, not wanting 
them to become Swiss citizens. The Swiss wish 
to admire their compatriots, and do not care ever 
to be outvoted by people who had the wrong 
reason for coming to the country. 

Between one and two hundred spies have been 
taken, less than ten of them women. During the 
week that I was in Geneva eleven spies were ar- 
rested there. Switzerland does not care to talk 
much about them, but stories do seep out. There 
is the tale of the dead fish, floating down the river 
towards Germany. Some of them were washed 
ashore, and found to be of papier-mache , con- 
taining information detrimental to France. There 
was the affable Italian, travelling with a large 

187 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

trunk, apparently wanting to borrow capital for 
his factory in Milan. At Lausanne he disap- 
peared, leaving his trunk behind. Impatient 
baggagemen shoved it out of their way; innocent 
travellers sat on it; a curious official opened it and 
found that it contained bombs enough to blow up 
all the city. There was the double story of the 
German Jew, Levy Moser, and the woman who 
loved him, a Hungarian. He was trying, seem- 
ingly, to interest local bankers in the attempt to 
lower French securities and bid up the value of 
the mark. The lady grew jealous of his attentions 
to another woman and betrayed him as a spy. 
She fled to Annemasse but was arrested there as 
an accomplice. 

But France followed me into Switzerland, for 
I found Lucien — poor Lucien. I met him at the 
house of a Swiss woman who was not only neutral, 
but merciful and understanding. For Lucien was 
a French deserter. There he sat, in the darkest 
corner of the little Swiss sitting-room, a boy of 
twenty-two, but a child. His pale face was not 
furtive ; desperate rather, lined with a misery that 
surely was its own suffering. When he knew I 
was only sorry for him, and not scornful, he talked 
to me. It is so easy to be scornful of a coward. 
I am sure that if I had to go over the top I 
should be terrified. I hope the difference between 
Lucien and me is that I should not run away. But 
I believe the thing that would keep me going 
would be good company on each side of me, and 

188 



THE GOOD LITTLE PAWN 

the fear (greater than fear of German guns) of 
having to live with myself after I had run 
away. 

" Madame," Lucien said, " it has always been 
so with me. I cannot bear a loud noise. I cannot 
bear the sound of groans. I cannot bear the sight 
of blood. I have always run away if anyone was 
sick or cried; if there was anything ugly. I love 
France, but I had not the courage to serve her. 
I tried, — but I had to run away. I ought to be 
in Zurich, or Basle, where it would be safer for 
me, — but there the Germans try to make a 
traitor of me. A traitor I am not. I could not 
stay there. I wanted to be as near France as I 
could. I was afraid of death from the German 
bayonets, and I ran away, but, madame, in my 
soul daily I have a thousand deaths ! " 

Poor little Lucien, looking, as if over the para- 
pet of Switzerland, at that home which he will 
never see again. 

I had not been long in Geneva before I found 
that Switzerland is not only a little pawn, but a 
good little pawn. She has spent millions in 
charities to the belligerents. She affords hospi- 
tality to twenty-five thousand of the wounded of 
all the fighting nations. She keeps them in mili- 
tary barracks and in hotels. She feels the finan- 
cial burden, though some day she will be repaid. 
Her best work is doubtless that done by the Red 
Cross. Switzerland founded, in 1863, the inter- 
national committee of the Red Cross. In 191 2, 

189 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

in Washington, it was suggested in a Red Cross 
conference that, in case of a European war, a 
clearing house for letters should be established. 
In September, 19 14, the present International 
Agency of Prisoners of War began its merciful 
function in Geneva. To-day there are four hun- 
dred workers who receive thousands of letters 
from all the fighting countries, asking for news of 
missing soldiers. The Agency tries to get this 
news; it forwards letters from one belligerent 
country to another. For months it has been try- 
ing to change that cruel German rule against Bel- 
gium, which is, in brief, that no good news may 
come from that country. Suppose a Belgian sol- 
dier wants to get news of his sick wife; if she is 
dead he will be told that; but if her health is im- 
proved, he will not be told that. With infinite 
tact these Swiss members of the Agency deal with 
the harsh rule of Germany. They have relieved 
the suspense of thousands of suffering civilians 
in all the warring countries. 

There is another office of the Swiss Red Cross 
which I witnessed. Every six weeks comes a fort- 
night during which the French and the German 
wounded soldiers pass through Geneva. Twice 
a day, between half-past seven at night and four 
in the morning, the two trains arrive. Members 
of the Red Cross, headed by the President, Miss 
Alice Favre, and the Secretary, Mr. Fred Schaz- 
mann, come down to the station to meet the trains 
with gifts of food and flowers and flags. Already 

190 



THE GOOD LITTLE PAWN 

they have received between twenty and thirty 
thousand men. 

One night I stood with them in the restaurant 
of the station, waiting for the train of French 
prisoners. The women were dressed in white; 
the men had the red cross brassards on their arms. 
Little Boy Scouts carried flowers and Swiss flags. 
Outside on the platform were wagons laden with 
soup and coffee, bread and meat. The noise of 
the train and a feeble cheer! 

" Ah, they are the grand blesses, the heavily 
wounded," a woman said; "they are too sick to 
cheer." 

The platform blossomed into color as we went 
out with the flowers and flags, and it rang with 
triumphant sound, for the Swiss sang their na- 
tional anthem as the train pulled in. Oh, those 
sick, white, hollow faces at the windows ! They 
smiled; they tried to sing the Marseillaise. We 
went into the trains. Those who were lying 
down looked up at us with faint smiles as we put 
flags in their hands, and held their heads so that 
they might drink the coffee or the soup. Such 
tired, dead lines in their cheeks; such signs of 
starving and anxiety; such glazed eyes! Those 
French faces, made for gaiety! But they knew 
they were out of Germany; these good Swiss 
people were to them almost their own people. 

Then I saw these Swiss Red Cross workers 
show the same tenderness to the Germans. The 
French and German trains arrived hours apart. 

191 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

When the train of Germans approached, and the 
Swiss again went out, singing their national an- 
them, and the Germans answered with " Die 
Wacht am Rhein," I understood why the Swiss 
could be neutral, because these Germans, too, had 
suffered in the wars, they, too, deserved sym- 
pathy, — only they had not been starved nor ill- 
treated in the prison camps. They looked well 
nourished. The privates I easily felt a sympathy 
for, but it was a struggle to look calmly at the 
officers. They took the best windows, crowding 
the privates in the background, and they 
looked down at us, bowing superciliously, 
condescendingly. 

" Do those persons," I asked a Red Cross girl, 
u consider that this is a kind of triumphal entry, 
and that we are welcoming conquerors? " 

" Please don't put that idea in my head," she 
pleaded; "remember that I have to be neutral. 
Poor officers ! Poor soldiers ! " 

No one could have grudged those German sol- 
diers their happiness. They had earned it. And 
how patriotic they were ! Someone started their 
song, Dost Thou Call, my Fatherland? They 
lowered their mugs of soup and beer to sing it, 
their eyes alight, their voices deep. And their 
singing would have moved the soul of a clod. 
With them it surely is a case of " my country right 
or wrong," — only those men never doubted that 
she is right. 

But it was n't the German soldiers who were 
192 



THE GOOD LITTLE PAWN 

the centre of that scene, but the Swiss Red Cross 
workers. Good people; they do know what neu- 
trality means, and what a wise, loving spirit 
means. The manifold activities of the Red Cross 
organization of Switzerland ought to teach all the 
warring countries what they owe to the good little 
pawn. 

All the way back to the border I blessed her. 
Then I was passed again through the customs, 
and my camera and notes were given back to me, 
smilingly. The tram slid upon French territory, 
and I was back in the world of horizon-blue, 
where neutrality is not understood and where, for 
many weary months, peace cannot come. 



i93 



CHAPTER XII 

The Repatriates 

The square before the Maine of a French 
frontier town; snow falling thickly, softly; 
flags and bright lights, and beyond them a velvety 
blackness stretching away on one side to the Jura 
Mountains, and on the other to distant Mont 
Blanc! A crowd of officials and of townsfolk, 
expectant, eager, sympathetic. Far off the sound 
of a motor-train, mingled with a thin singing of 
the Marseillaise in shrill boyish voices. Then the 
sudden sweep of the train into the lighted square, 
and women, children, and old men, dark-clad 
figures, dropping heavily down into the snow, 
and looking about them with weary, gaunt, brave 
faces, stamped with sorrow — but presently to be 
contented, even happy. 

They were people who had been without a 
country for nearly two and a half years, yet living 
in their own homes, the first of a consignment of 
twenty-five thousand whom the Germans, because 
they found them a burden, were sending via Switz- 
erland out of occupied France into unoccupied 
France. They had just crossed the border after 
having been detrained and fed and cared for in 
hospitable Geneva, and now in the town of Anne- 
masse they were to be repatriated, made to feel 

194 



THE REPATRIATES 

that they were once more free. They were only 
a small proportion of those who asked to come. 
In Roubaix eight thousand asked, in Lille, nine 
thousand; but from each town only fifteen hun- 
dred were sent. 

Helped by welcoming hands, they stumbled 
across the square and up the steps, and poured 
slowly into a great room all hung with their own 
tricolor that they had not seen for so many long- 
ing months. Flags were given them, were pinned 
on their coats. Children were taken from tired 
women; officials and attendant Chasseurs d y Alp'in 
pointed out seats ; the room grew fuller and fuller, 
and the passages outside became clogged. Yet 
there was almost no noise; these people were used 
to silence and self-suppression. 

As I looked at them, sitting and standing pa- 
tiently, waiting to be told what to do next, they 
seemed to me a more poignant sight than the thou- 
sands of wounded soldiers I had seen in base hos- 
pitals, the many other thousands I had seen march- 
ing along the road from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun, or 
even than the "mutiles" hobbling on their wooden 
legs near the Arc de Triomphe, under which they 
shall one day pass when victory is assured to 
France. 

Picture to yourself the look of the emigrants 
that come in to Ellis Island, bewildered and ex- 
hausted; take away the dreams that emigrants 
have of success and happiness; add underfeeding, 
a burning sense of wrong and of shame, and you 

195 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

will have something like the effect of these pil- 
grims from their own seized territory. 

A strange, sad, abnormal group they seemed. 
There were no boys over fourteen among them, 
no men except those who were old, or middle-aged 
and sickly, almost no unmarried women. The 
Germans had sent back few people who could be 
of use to them, — only mothers with children who 
needed all their attention, sick people, and useless 
old women and men, and a very few, chiefly young 
women, whom some officer especially favored. 
They all looked ineffably jaded, — and well they 
might, since for twelve or thirteen days they had 
not slept in beds. When the Germans decided 
to evacuate them, they put them for ten days in 
barns where there was no fire and only straw to 
lie on. This was to keep them from getting any 
final information as to movements of troops, 
which might be useful to the French. After that 
they were searched, and then put on trains — 
travelling from two to three days shut up in un- 
comfortable cars, obliged at night to take care of 
their children in pitch darkness. Now these little 
ones clustered around their mothers, the more 
pathetic because they showed such unchildlike pa- 
tience. We know how fretful even the sweetest- 
tempered of children may be after the strain of a 
railroad journey, or a picnic, or a circus. But 
these children, schooled by the discipline of their 
enemy, were almost uncannily quiet. Added to 
the weariness, every face wore a sort of mask of 

196 



THE REPATRIATES 

resignation, or inscrutability. They had quite 
gone beyond any self-centred storms of suffering. 
And these were French faces, — faces framed for 
animation and joy. So they stood and sat, not 
yet realizing that they were in France. 

The prefect, M. Surugue, rose, and began, in 
the most sympathetic voice, a speech that was talk 
rather than speech. 

" I welcome you," he said, " in the name of 
France and in the name of Haute-Savoie. We 
know what you have suffered, and we hope here, 
in unoccupied France, to make you forget your 
griefs." 

They thanked him. 

" Merci, monsieur," they said. 

But their voices, if polite, were apathetic. So 
far, he had scarcely touched them. One woman 
in black, with a little boy at her side, did indeed 
wipe her eyes. I learned afterwards that she 
and her four, little sons had been living in a part 
of France bombarded now by the English and 
French. The Germans would not allow her to 
go farther north or into Germany for safety. The 
fire from her own people had killed three of her 
little boys. I can write and you can read of that 
tragedy in fifty words, but do we feel that mother 
crouching in the dark, day after day, and night 
after night, waiting for the shells that were falling 
in the street to strike her house? Do we feel her 
despairing hope in the hours when the bombard- 
ment ceased? Do we see her putting three sleepy 

197 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

little boys on a straw mattress in the corner of 
the cellar, while she held the youngest in her 
arms, — and then the shell that tore into frag- 
ments the tender bodies she loved. We have no 
right to dismiss such a tragedy out of our con- 
sciences and hearts with the words, " But that 
is war." 

An old woman beside her sat then and through- 
out with perfectly immobile face. She wore a 
bonnet and scarf in a fashion that gave her head 
and face the look of one of Michael Angelo's 
sybils, — and she remained as immutable. Now 
and then a woman cast her eyes upon her children 
to see if they were still safe, or glanced over at the 
desks where sat girls of Annemasse, ready to help 
in the official business of repatriating. 

The prefect spoke again, 

" Whatever you have suffered," he said, " what- 
ever the Germans may have told you, never have 
you doubted the genius* of France, never have you 
doubted that France would fight on to the end, 
never have you doubted that victory would be 
hers!" 

Then how these people cast away their weari- 
ness and hunger, their grief and resignation, and 
sprang into fire. The prefect had not been able 
to move them when he spoke of their personal 
sorrows; they were quite beyond self-pity! But 
when he spoke of their country! Of a sudden 
they seemed to realize that they were home at 
last, seemed to long to put on instant record their 



THE REPATRIATES 

patriotism, their passionate belief in the victorious 
destiny of their France. 

" Vive la France! " they cried, and waved, and 
their poor dull eyes shone, their lips quivered and 
smiled, and tears, that the Germans had never been 
able to start, rolled down their cheeks. Even the 
little children waved their tiny flags, and shouted, 

" Vive la France! " 

The next part of the prefect's talk shows how 
firm the French are in facing facts. He told these 
women that as soon as they were rested they must 
work; the soldiers in the trenches were straining 
every nerve, making every sacrifice; it was chiefly 
upon the women at home that France must depend. 
The average underfed exhausted woman would 
have every excuse for weeping if she were told 
she must begin to work immediately; not so these 
French war-women, who seem able to bear any- 
thing. Finally the prefect, remarking that they 
could have had no real news since August, 19 14, 
gave them a resume of the history of the war from 
the battle of the Marne down to the final com- 
munique of the day. 

Then began the formal business of repatriation. 
The refugees filed before the rows of desks where 
girl-officers examined the labels and passports 
which the Germans had sent with them, and made 
out fresh cards stating each person's name, age, 
profession, parentage, place and date of birth 
and of marriage, place of residence, date of arrest 
by the Germans, reason for evacuation by the 

199 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

Germans, and duration of internment in each 
prison camp. The question was also asked as to 
whether the return had been voluntary or not. 
Then would come other formalities. After that, 
if it was the night division of repatriates, they 
would be disposed of in various hotels and lodg- 
ings; if it was the day division they would be 
started by train to their final destination, after 
having had some of their paper money changed 
into good silver. 

While the repatriates were engaged at these 
desks, various people looked after their children. 
I was standing near a handsome fresh-colored 
young woman with a baby on her knee. I had 
noticed her chiefly because she looked well-fed, 
was well-dressed and well-booted, because her fine 
face had a passionate, sullen, and undisciplined 
look, and, finally, because I was afraid she was 
going to let the baby roll off her lap. I asked her 
name, and I shall translate her mumble into 
" Marie-Louise." 

" You must be very tired, Marie-Louise," I 
said. 

" Tired enough, madame." 

" Let me hold the baby for you, then," I said. 

She let me take him. He was a beautiful baby, 
with a strong head, good lungs, and predatory 
little fists, never still. 

" What a dear baby, Marie-Louise ! " I said. 
"What a magnificent head! " 

" It 's a Boche head," cried Marie-Louise, vio- 
200 



THE REPATRIATES 

lently, " and that is a Boche baby. I was hungry, 
madame. Those others in the village ; they could 
not give me anything to eat, but they could give 
me hard words for having a German officer for a 
friend!" 

Poor Marie-Louise ! Surely she and the baby 
were equally deserving of pity. 

" Some of them would call me a spy, now," 
Marie-Louise said through her tears, " but me, — 
I '11 show them I 'm not that." 

She was summoned to a desk and I held the 
little Boche baby, and rather guessed that with a 
parent like Marie-Louise he would turn out to 
be French. Dear little chap ! I wished his mother 
could have loved him, and I think he will yet find 
a mother who, believing he is all French, will love 
him. 

I could not follow Marie-Louise into the vari- 
ous other rooms in which she went through the 
several formalities which finally turned her into a 
free citizen of France. But I asked about her. 
She had passed from room number one into room 
number two, where letters await the repatriates. 
They have been without news for almost two and 
a half years, nor have their relatives in France 
known whether they were alive or dead. Very 
rarely news reaches certain people through prison- 
ers, and sometimes a message, not a letter, may 
come through the Red Cross of Frankfort. But 
in general, a blank curtain of silence has divided 
the people in the seized territory from those in 

20 1 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

unoccupied France. Husbands, hearing that some 
repatriates were coming, write to Annemasse, in 
the hope that among the number will be their 
wives and children, or, at least, neighbors who 
can give news of them. Some of the repatriates 
look for letters from their husbands, and do not 
find them, nor ever will, because the men have 
died for France. 

Marie-Louise passed through this room, know- 
ing well there would be nothing for her and 
went into a third room, where sat a number 
of keen-faced intelligence officers, — several 
Frenchmen and one Englishman. They had all 
been barristers or judges, or in some branch 
of civil service where they had learned to read 
character. Their business was to weed out pos- 
sible spies, and also to get what information the 
repatriates could give them of German military 
movements and morale, and conduct and psychol- 
ogy in general. 

To these men young Marie-Louise said, 

" I want to go into service. I want to work 
hard in some decent French home." 

" And your baby? " they asked, " do you hope 
to keep it with you, or will you put it out to 
nurse? " 

" From the moment I reach France," said 
Marie-Louise, " that baby is not mine any longer. 
It belongs to France, if France wants it. Take 
him away from me, that baby ! Do not let me see 
him again, or know where he is gone. Bring him 

202 



THE REPATRIATES 

up as a good French citizen. When he is a man 
make a soldier of him, and let him go and kill his 
father!" 

Poor Marie-Louise, and sad world of war 
where such things must be, where even mother- 
hood can be changed into such everlasting bitter- 
ness. This episode of Marie-Louise made me 
open my eyes wide whenever I saw a child less 
than twenty-one months old. There were several, 
and in all the cases the girl had been won by hunger 
or misery, and in almost all the cases they had no 
love for their children, or else a grudging, humili- 
ated love. They had humanity enough; they 
wanted the children to be well taken care of, and 
to be French, only not to be known as their 
children. During the first year of occupation, 
whenever children were born of German fathers, 
they were bought by the Germans, at a good price, 
too, and sent into Germany to be reared. But for 
over a year, so the repatriates say, there has not 
been food enough in Germany to take care of legal 
Germans. 

" It is like the German insolence," remarked a 
Frenchman dryly, " to send us back these women 
with German babies to feed!" Nevertheless, 
these babies will be sent to orphan asylums, each 
labelled, " Father and mother unknown," and will 
be brought up as carefully as if all their blood 
were French. 

Women who have been known to be friendly 
with Germans are always sharply scrutinized. 

203 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

Yet very few spies are found. Mostly the few 
who have yielded have been, like Marie-Louise, 
hungry; others have been victims. The woman 
the intelligence officers scrutinized most sharply 
is the cosmopolitan person, who knows two or 
three languages and who has travelled. The pro- 
vincial woman is less dangerous. The neighbors 
of a suspected woman are examined for informa- 
tion about her, and their verdicts are carefully 
sifted. In the end, if there seems ground for real 
suspicion, she is watched, as unobtrusively as pos- 
sible, until her loyalty is determined. Very few 
German-born spies venture into the convoys, as 
they are easily discovered, and, moreover, can get 
into France more easily as ordinary tourists. It 
is said that it is a favorite trick of the Germans 
to arrest a French woman who is malleable and 
take her away to Germany. Her neighbors pity 
her as a prisoner, but really she is being trained 
as a spy. And some such women go purposely, 
meaning to " double-cross " the Germans and spy 
for France. The main work of the intelligence 
officers has not consisted in finding spies, but in 
analyzing the information certain observing re- 
patriates have given them as to German doings 
in northern France. 

So these twenty-five thousand people came into 
unoccupied France, at the rate of a thousand a 
day, divided, as to their arrival in Annemasse, in 
six daily groups. They were not all peasants; 
some were quite well-to-do citizens of Lille or 

204 



THE REPATRIATES 

Roubaix or Valenciennes or Douai. But whether 
the women wore Persian lamb fur coats and vel- 
vet hats, or old dolmans and shawls, or perhaps 
cheap crepe hats, they produced the same sombre, 
exhausted, badly-nourished effect, and always they 
became revived when the prefect reminded them 
that they had never doubted the final victory of 
France. They hastened to report that German 
officials made this remark to every departing 
adult : 

" Tell the people in France to demand peace. 
It will be better for France to sue now than later." 

The message sent by the French left behind 
was this : 

" Ask them to come and deliver us as soon as 
they can. But tell them that no matter how long 
we have to wait we shall be steadfast." 

A pretty good showing for underfed people, for 
that is what they are. And it is also a pretty good 
showing that for all their exhaustion, and their 
preoccupation with the formalities that repatri- 
ated them, they did not forget to be grateful for 
what food they had had. One of the first women 
I talked to put out her hand for the little Ameri- 
can flag on my coat, and she wept. 

" Tell them," she said, " that one of my two 
children died for lack of milk, and then the Ameri- 
can condensed milk came, and my baby boy is 
saved for France." 

Then other women crowded forward. 

"Ah! America! " they cried. " Our children 
205 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

would have died but for America. Thank Amer- 
ica for what she has done for us." 

What they were referring to is the help that 
excellent organization " The Commission for 
Relief in Belgium and Northern France " has 
given to the hungry people in those regions. I 
hereby pass on their thanks, and frankly beg that 
America will give to the Commission the addi- 
tional support it must have if the population of 
over nine millions and a half still in northern 
France and Belgium (of whom between two and 
a half and three and a half millions are wholly or 
partly destitute) are not to starve to death. As 
it is, the Belgian and Allied Governments supply a 
great deal of money, but with food prices and 
freight charges rising and native food stuffs fail- 
ing America must give more help; it has not yet 
given a tenth of what is needed — not only in 
food but in clothes and shoes. Most of the re- 
patriates have had no meat for nearly two years, 
no butter and no milk; no potatoes for six or eight 
months. Nor can they, with meat nearly three 
dollars a pound, butter a dollar and a half, and 
eggs twenty-five cents each. The children would 
indeed have died but for the condensed milk from 
the United States. What they have mostly eaten 
is bread, — and the bread they do not wholly like. 
The wheat is milled under the municipalities. The 
ordinary milling of wheat into flour is from sixty- 
five to seventy per cent. In the first year of the 
war it was ninety; now the Commission has re- 

206 



THE REPATRIATES 

duced it to eighty-two, but it will evidently have 
to be reduced still further, as so many of the 
people, in enfeebled state, find the hard, black, 
sticky product indigestible. The Commission only 
wishes it were at liberty to bring in fine white flour. 
We who never know what it is to miss a meal, ex- 
cept when the doctor advises it, owe more than 
we have paid to the hungry people whose land 
has been seized. 

These people who came back were very ready 
to talk. The mothers said that they had asked 
to return partly because they were afraid their 
children would be undersized and sick, and partly 
because they could get no drugs. The Germans 
do not allow the Commission to furnish drugs. 
They say they need drugs themselves, and will not 
permit the French and Belgians to have what they 
themselves cannot get. Naturally, the repatriates 
spoke a good deal of their gladness in the pros- 
pect of getting real milk and meat, and some of 
them complained that though the Germans played 
fair with the food of the Commission, they some- 
times took chickens and rabbits to send to their 
families in Germany. 

In a village near Douai, any woman who keeps 
hens is forced to give from two to three eggs each 
week to the Kommandantur ; which means over 
twelve hundred eggs. Whoever keeps a cow must 
give two pounds of butter a week; if she refuses, 
or is supposed to be cheating, she is fined a thou- 
sand marks. One woman with little children 

207 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

slipped into the country and bought a hundred eggs 
at something less than twenty cents apiece. She 
was forced to walk for five and a half hours to the 
place where the Germans passed judgment upon 
her, was made to give up the eggs and was fined 
several marks. In the village of Hirson the 
people have to carry all their milk to the Kom- 
mandantur. The cream is skimmed off, and the 
people are then allowed to buy back the skimmed 
milk. In Hirson, also, the Germans requisitioned 
all the hay; paid for it with paper which merely 
stated that it had been requisitioned, but made no 
promise to pay, and then sold it back again to the 
people for feeding the cattle, insisting on payment 
in German silver. 

Indeed, they say that the Germans are very 
keen on getting money, and sometimes force a 
commune to issue far more paper than it will ever 
be able to pay. Likewise, they collect all the silver 
they can. For example, if a woman wishes to 
visit a friend in the same town but in another com- 
mune, she must pay half a mark, and at the same 
time give the Germans three marks in silver for 
the equivalent in paper money, thus losing between 
twenty-five and thirty per cent. They make a 
good deal of money from fines. Anyone who is 
found to have hidden a bottle of oil is fined three 
marks; a bottle of wine, ten marks. In the Ar- 
dennes, whenever the people cannot produce their 
identity cards, they are fined from twenty to forty 
marks. When the repatriates were leaving they 

p;o8 



THE REPATRIATES 

were told that they could take away sixty dollars 
in French pre-war money. Before they started 
the Germans commandeered this, and gave them 
paper instead. 

There were no repatriates but had something 
interesting to say. A woman of education and 
property summed up thus the situation in the 
north of France : 

" As is the case the world over," she said, " it 
is never the people with money who are annoyed 
by the Germans. They respect property. From 
observing my poorer neighbors, I do not think 
that they suffered from the harshness of the Ger- 
man soldiers, only from the officers. And this 
harshness was never committed with anger — 
never. It was simply the system, the deliberate 
will of German kultur — just cold-blooded system. 

" They were our masters, and it was part of 
their system to show it. Is it any wonder that 
some of us have been asking, for a year and a 
half, to be sent away? We Ve had to leave our 
doors unlocked, so that those in authority could 
enter day or night. If an officer wanted any of 
our pictures or wool mattresses, or anything we 
had except our food, he could, and did, take it. 
If he was cold and lacked fuel, he could, and 
sometimes did, take our furniture to burn. Con- 
stantly the mastership made itself felt. We could 
only go a certain distance from our doorsteps 
without a permit, and visiting another town and 
writing to people in another town were impossible. 

209 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

We had to be in our houses at a certain hour, — 
not before three, and not after six or eight, de- 
pending on the place and season, 

" One custom that annoyed us was the constant 
posters and proclamations ordering us to do this 
or not to do that. We never got up without won- 
dering what new poster we should see that day. 
Sometimes the town-crier would have to go abroad 
several times a day, ringing his bell and making 
German announcements. They annoyed us, too, 
by ringing our church bells in celebration of so- 
called German victories, — and they rang them 
very often ! But we never believed anything they 
said. The thing that made us happiest, and this 
they never stopped us from doing, was to run out 
of doors and look up whenever a French or an 
English aeroplane passed overhead. That seemed 
to us to bring France and victory nearer." 

One topic those I talked to spoke of most ve- 
hemently was forced work. They showed a great 
deal of feeling when they told of the way the 
men and boys who refused to work were treated. 
The French civilian prisoners are supposed to 
choose whether they shall or shall not work; liter- 
ally there is scarcely choice. The following are 
the accounts given me by Madame A , a book- 
seller in a large town, and Mademoiselle Jeanne, 
a seamstress from Lille. 

" Our men do not want to work for the Ger- 
mans," Madame A said, "because they do 

not want to be of use to them, and because they 

210 



THE REPATRIATES 

are afraid of hurting the French who are fighting 
for us. What have the Germans done? They 
have taken away all the raw material from our 
factories, the cloth and the wool, and also the 
machines, and have sent them to Germany. In 
Courrieres, the mining country, only four out of 
twenty-one shafts are working. The rest they 
destroyed, and took the copper to Germany. 
They have even taken our copper cooking vessels. 
They have made unemployment, and then they 
have said to our boys and men, ' Because you 
have nothing to do, we offer you work.' 

" I have a son of eighteen who is a carpenter. 
Last spring the Germans came suddenly into my 
house at three o'clock in the morning. They woke 
my son, and said, ' Get dressed, and come with 
us.' They gave him half an hour only. They took 
him to the Ardennes, where he works on the land. 
They give him four francs a week and his food, 
— very bad food. I scarcely ever hear from him, 
and I do not know when he will come back. 

" The harvest work is the worst paid, but a 
man who will sew sacks may make as much as 
fifty cents a day. If he will go into the trenches 
to work (where our men are sometimes killed by 
French or English fire) he may earn a dollar, 
while a man who will work in the munitions is 
very well paid. A man must be very badly treated 
indeed before he will go into munitions. But 
figure to yourself : the Municipality can only allow 
a man who is unemployed nine francs a week. 

211 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

How can he live on that, even with help from the 
American Commission? And even if he tries to, 
the Germans do their best to break his spirit. The 
bitterest of all is that if he does go to work for 
the Germans, the money comes out of the munici- 
palities after all. They try to win both ways, these 
Bodies." 

Mademoiselle Jeanne had less to say about 
figures, and spoke with less restraint. 

" I am from Lille, me," she said, her dark eyes 
flashing, her brown head tossing defiantly. " In 
Lille we let the Germans see how we despise them. 
We ignore them; we act as if they were not there, 
and they don't like it. When we girls walk down 
the street, and German officers and men try to flirt 
with us, we turn away our heads, or perhaps we 
laugh insultingly, or perhaps we begin to sing a 
little air. 

" This is the way the Germans behave when 
they take us away from home, — that is, if they 
are taking many from the same part of the town. 
They call out many of their soldiers, and they 
put machine guns in the street to fire on the people 
if they rebel. Then four soldiers come to each 
house from which people are to be taken, and they 
always arrive at two or three in the morning to 
make it more terrifying for us. They walk into 
our bedrooms and they say, ' Get up, and come 
just as you are into the hall.' So we must obey, 
and stand there until a German officer chooses 
which of us shall be taken. 

212 



THE REPATRIATES 

" My parents and my sister and I were standing 
against the wall, and the officer looked at us, and 
pointed to my sister and said, i You get ready.' 
But I said, ' My sister looks strong, but she is a 
cripple. I will go in her place.' He made her 
walk, and saw that it was so. Then he told me 
to dress. It was very sad to dress and pack, and 
my parents and sister crying. Then I was taken 
out of the house, and put in a workshop down in 
the town. They kept us there till five in the after- 
noon, — all those hours, when I might have been 
with my own family. 

" They brought in other girls till there were 
nearly two hundred of us — very sad. But we 
were angry at the girls who let the Germans see 
them cry. At five they put us in a cattle train, and 
took us to a place near Fournies. There we found 
we were to work in the fields. They turned us 
into a filthy stable, where, as it was too wet to 
work, we had to stay for two days. We had to 
make ourselves comfortable as best we could. 
We went out and picked dandelions for soup, and 
found a little wood to build a fire. Some of the 
girls were children of rich parents. They had 
never done hard work, or suffered much depriva- 
tion, nor had they ever been away from their 
parents. 

" When the weather improved they took us 
out in fours, with a German soldier in front, and 
one behind, armed with sticks. If a girl fell out, 
or did not walk quickly enough, she got a good 

213 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

hard knock with the stick. They put us to plant- 
ing and weeding. Then they quartered us in 
different houses. That was bad; men and women 
in the same houses and sometimes in the same 
room, and no French families left who could look 
after us. 

u There was a woman in a big house near Cam- 
brai where there were thirty-five German soldiers. 
She had two daughters, one nineteen and one thir- 
teen. They told the mother she was to go to 
Belgium. She said she would not leave without 
her daughters. So they drove her out at the point 
of the bayonet. The girls they kept to cook and 
do the housework, and they are not allowed to 
write to their mother. When the older girl cried, 
and said it was not right to separate them from 
their mother, the German officer said, 

" ' This is nothing. You think you know some- 
thing of war. You know nothing. Before the 
war is over, you French women will have nothing 
but your eyes left to cry with.' 

" Still," allowed Mademoiselle Jeanne, " with 
my own eyes I never saw a German offer any- 
thing worse to a girl than a blow with a stick if 
he thought she was lazy. For me, after I worked 
in the fields they put me in a brick factory, where 
it was too hard for me, and I got sick. My 
mother begged the Kommandantur of Lille, and 
he gave me permission to be repatriated." 

There was a stoical-faced girl of Valenciennes 
who spoke very calmly of her own sufferings, but 

214 



THE REPATRIATES 

lost her stoicism when she spoke of the treatment 
of the male civilians who would not work. 

" The Germans do not understand the spirit 
of our people," she said; " they try to change us 
by brutality. It is terrible, the suffering! We 
have some strong young boys and men in Valen- 
ciennes, and the Germans want their work, in 
order to release their own men for the front. 
When the boys say ' No,' they are put in a black 
prison, and given only a little bread to eat. If 
they still say ' No,' they are hung up for hours 
by the neck, or wire is tied round their wrists, 
and they are hung up that way. I have seen them 
so. I have dressed their cut wrists. I know. I 
think the soldiers of Valenciennes are cruel be- 
cause they are better fed. It is a permanent base, 
and they are out of danger, and they have no suf- 
fering of their own to teach them what they are 
inflicting on us. 

" Nor is this all, madame. When the Germans 
can get our boys to work in the fields, or the 
mines, they often house them in a barracks or 
workshed some little way from the town. This 
is lighted, and the French and English airmen, 
taking it for German munition works, perhaps, 
have dropped bombs on it, and killed their own 
people. 

" But most cruel of all is this. Some boys I 
know who were strong and obstinate would not 
work. So then the Germans took them away from 
Valenciennes, close to the firing-line. They set 

215 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

them under German observation balloons, because 
the French and English shell these very often. 
All day long they kept them there. Some were 
wounded with the shrapnel, and others suffered 
great suspense. At the end of the day the German 
officer sent for them and he said, 

" * Now, will you work? ' 

" Even the little boys have the courage not to 
work. I know of two boys of fifteen who stayed 
hidden in a cellar for two years so the Germans 
could not make them work, and friends fed them. 
One is dead of consumption, and the other dying. 
Two more of fifteen refused to work, and 
were sent into Germany to prison for two 
months. They were brought back when I was 
leaving, and asked if they would work, and 
again they said ' No.' I hope they will not put 
those brave boys under the German observation 
balloons." 

When the Germans found it impossible to force 
enough Frenchmen to do their work, they im- 
ported Russian or Belgian prisoners. In a region 
in the Pas de Calais, the French in 191 5 cultivated 
their fields, but the Germans took all the harvest 
from them. So in 19 16 they refused to cultivate. 
Then the Germans brought in three hundred Rus- 
sians. The men were literally starving, and 
begged the French for food. The Germans re- 
fused to allow any to be given; one girl was men- 
aced with a gun for offering bread to a Russian. 
But the French buried some bread in the fields, 

216 



THE REPATRIATES 

which the Russians afterwards got. The Ger- 
mans also use the Russians to cut down the beauti- 
ful forests of the Aisne, sending the wood to Ger- 
many. The inhabitants say that these trees are 
cut down as the Germans would never cut their 
own. This may mean that the Germans do not 
expect to keep the Aisne territory. 

There are several thousand Belgian civilian 
prisoners as well as Russians working in the Aisne 
country, and they are almost as hungry. The 
ration seems to be three pounds of bread for four 
men per day. The repatriates from the region 
of Laon report that the four thousand Belgians 
there are in a pitiable condition. They work on 
the railways and upon the roads. Whenever 
they can the French assist the prisoners, but if 
they are found out they are severely punished. 
One girl, whose family had a little money, 
was fined a hundred and fifty marks for putting 
half a mark on a stone where a Russian v/ould 
find it. 

Reports differ about the condition of the Ger- 
man soldiers. In the region of Valenciennes there 
is no doubt that they are well fed. In other places, 
when transportation is delayed, they may have 
their lean days. But all accounts seem to agree 
that though the fighting German men may be well 
fed, their families at home are hungry. The re- 
patriates from Lille say that the German soldiers 
try to buy the rice that the American committee 
sends the interned French. Others say that the 

217 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

German soldiers save up their rations for days 
before they go on their visits home, and that they 
always come back unhappy and silent. Some of 
them, indeed, have refused to accept furlough 
because they cannot bear to see the misery of 
those behind the firing lines. 

The repatriates feel very keenly the fact that 
their municipalities are under German control, 
even though local native municipal and communal 
authorities continue their functions. The Ger- 
mans have divided the occupied territory into three 
areas. The first is a limited section, just behind 
the fighting line, called the " Operating Zone." 
Here no food relief work can be done. The sec- 
ond, called the " Etape Zone," includes northern 
France and the larger part of east and west Flan- 
ders. It includes a population of something like 
3,840,000. This is governed by a German gen- 
eral staff, and the subsidiary military authorities. 
The third area is called the " Occupation Zone " ; 
its population, roughly speaking, 5,748,000. 
Here there is a joint civil and military govern- 
ment, with the seat at Brussels. 

The Germans interfere very little with the 
municipalities, but when they want money the 
mayor must get it for them. Many people from 
a certain village in the department of Aisne said 
that each of the communes had been taxed four 
thousand dollars for the " entertainment " of the 
German army. Several mayors went together to 
the Kommandantur at Fournies to protest, urging 

218 



THE REPATRIATES 

that they could not raise the money. The reply 
was to undress them entirely, and to shut them up 
together in a room, telling them that they might 
have their clothes back when they consented. The 
peasants and officials alike felt that there was 
something peculiarly insulting in this grotesque 
stripping away of dignity. 

How many many stories there were, and all of 
them vivid, one for every worn face, and fre- 
quently one multiplied ! The number never made 
them lose force or significance. It is strange and 
bitter to think of the commonplace happy lives 
these French people used to lead, now so hor- 
ribly changed into tragedy. There was a baby of 
two with pale eyes, — sick eyes. Its mother had 
had to keep it in a cellar ever since its birth, be- 
cause practically all the houses in the village had 
been demolished, and there was nowhere else to 
go. There was another woman, with two con- 
sumptive children. Two others had died, one, 
she said, of fright. The Germans had " turned 
her blood," had poisoned her through her fear! 
There is the story of a woman in a little village 
in Ardennes which the Germans had burned with- 
out notice. There was no means of rebuilding, 
so the people had to sleep in the cold church where 
her children died. There was Adrienne, the girl 
of fifteen, who came alone with her two little 
brothers, and no relatives to welcome her, or place 
to go. Her father and mother were killed by a 
shell when the village was bombarded. There 

219 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

was a woman, plainly dying of consumption, with 
a wildly patriotic light on her face, and a beauti- 
ful two-year old child, as yet untainted, in her 
arms. 

There was little Germaine, who was very in- 
dignant because, when she mispronounced Ger- 
man, she was whipped, something that does not 
happen in French schools. She told me of her 
French schoolmaster, who refused to use a book 
that called the Kaiser " Our august sovereign," 
and Germany the most beautiful country; he was 
sent to prison in Germany. There was a story of 
a man who would have been there if he had not 
been killed on the frontier. People try to go to 
Belgium to buy food, and smuggle it across the 
border. Some go because their families are too 
hungry for endurance; some because they want 
to make a little money. The sentries have strict 
orders to shoot, and every day poor smugglers are 
killed. 

What I shall remember longest is little Ernest. 
I found him in a small house where he had been 
put by Mademoiselle Goessens, the, woman who, 
with Madame Oriel, assists M. Perrier, the excel- 
lent commissioner, and M. Surugue, the prefect, 
in receiving and disposing of the repatriates. In 
this house were other children of whose history 
there was only the vaguest information. Two 
were Belgians who had been sent the previous 
year. Their father and mother were at work, and 
the Germans had come, taken the children and 

220 



THE REPATRIATES 

shipped them away. Two others were so tiny 
they could not tell their own names. Two others 
insisted that they had parents, but could not tell 
who they were. Ernest stood at the snow-bound 
window when I entered the house, a little figure 
of infinite grief. He had a face the tragedy of 
which would have halted even a swift runner. 
His big dark eyes were still, melancholy; his mouth 
was hopeless, his little jaw sagged; his cheeks 
were thin and bloodless. He had the expression 
of some sorrowful woman who can learn nothing 
more of grief. When I talked to him he answered 
haltingly, as if he scarcely understood, and in 
whispers, as if he were afraid. He thought he 
was six years old. He thought his father and 
little sister were alive, but he did not know where 
they had gone. I was told that he had been alone 
with his mother when she died, and it was days 
before he was found. He came when he was 
called, let himself be moved about; it was dread- 
ful to see his passivity, his broken nerves. They 
said he never spoke unless he was spoken to, and 
never, never smiled. I was determined that he 
should, and the next day I brought him some toys. 
He looked at them impassively, until I showed him 
a fat red ball, as big as his head, which bounced 
to an unbelievable height. Then, indeed, I 
coaxed a smile from him, — just a little flicker of 
lips and eyes, like faint sunlight shimmering on 
water. He took the ball in his arms and, leaning 
over to me, he whispered, 

221 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

" Do you think I shall see my father and my 
little sister soon? " 

Never again, Ernest; but the future is yours. 
Somewhere in unoccupied France you are being 
lured and loved back to normality and happiness, 
for you are part of the hope of the nation. 



222 



CHAPTER XIII 

" When the Germans Came " 

WE all remember how, as children, we 
snuggled close to hear a story, knowing it 
would end happily because it began " Once upon 
a time." After I had been in France for a few 
weeks, it seemed to me that all the sad or dra- 
matic stories began, " When the Germans came." 

Men, women, and children have told me their 
stories, but it is the words of the women which 
sank deepest. Not that they have sacrificed 
more, or borne more than the men; but that so 
many of them are now homeless, alone, poor, and 
with the responsibility of bringing up their chil- 
dren without the father's help. The women rep- 
resent the broken homes and broken hearts in 
France. 

I have listened to their stories in Paris, or in 
the war zone; some of them were refugees, and 
some still clung to their homes, for all that Ger- 
man shells threatened them. These women were 
of all the classes : mistresses of chateaux, now in 
the hands of the Germans; wives of manufac- 
turers or of shopkeepers who had fled before the 
enemy; those two classes have generally enough 
property so that they can pay their own way and 
perhaps help others. But there is the third class, 

223 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

the peasant women, who have lost not only their 
homes, but all their little gear, who took their 
children and fled before the Germans, hurrying 
along roads that led them away from home to 
they knew not what new terror and strangeness. 
Their children died in their arms, or, in the hud- 
dling terror, were separated from them and shel- 
tered by strangers, — or perhaps not sheltered 
at all. 

Such women are taken care of in refuges in 
Paris and other cities. I heard many of their 
stories in Saint Sulpice, perhaps the most notable 
of the refuges, — a great building, once a school 
for youths studying for the priesthood. In the 
autumn of 19 14, when the refugees came pouring 
into Paris, an official of the police force had the 
idea of using it for their benefit. His policemen 
helped him make repairs, served as stewards, 
and escorted the children to and from school, — 
a pleasant interpretation of a policeman's duty of 
guardianship. Hundreds of families live in the 
little rooms on the sounding corridors. The hus- 
bands, if they are still alive, come here for their 
permissions. The mothers, when they can, work 
to aid in their own support. When it is possible, 
they make homes of their own outside. All these 
women are grateful for the help that is given 
them, but they long for their native places. Most 
of them were from the country and they find city 
life hard. They were used to plenty of room. 
They long for their green spaces and their pop- 

224 



"WHEN THE GERMANS CAME" 

lar trees, — and for places to put the " things " 
they have already begun to accumulate. 

For me the symbol of the refugee mother will 
always be the grief-ravaged face of Madame 
Grignon of Premesque, northern France. I saw 
her first in that splendid house of shelter, Saint 
Sulpice, where she was sitting in the nursery. At 
first I did not notice her, so absorbed was I in the 
rows of little pink and blue cribs for the babies. 
I walked among them, seeing occasionally a 
healthy baby, more often a sickly child bearing 
the marks of the privations and terrors its mother 
had suffered in the long march before its birth. 
My look lighted at last upon three depressed chil- 
dren, perhaps four years old, sitting at a table. 
I followed their eyes and saw Madame Grignon 
weeping silently, most pitiably. I turned her chair 
so that the children would forget her face. A 
nurse told me that her husband had gone to the 
front and she had stayed on in Premesque, hoping 
that the Germans would not come, at least till her 
baby was born. But they did come, and after the 
shells were falling in the village and the French 
and Germans were fighting in the streets, she took 
her three children, aged four and two and one, 
and she walked heavily, carrying one and some- 
times two of them. She went as far and as 
quickly as she could, and when she was out of 
range of the shells, and the sound of the cannon 
was only a dull roar, she rested in a barn. There, 
all alone, she bore her baby, the other three chil- 

225 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

dren crying with hunger and terror and cold. 
Then she went to Armentieres and took shelter in 
an abandoned house. When that house came 
down she was taken to Paris. There her two 
youngest children died; she has no word of her 
husband, and Jeanette, her eldest child, lies very 
ill. 

I saw Jeanette in the hospital. She was in the 
isolated ward and I had to look at her through 
a window. She had a pale, tragic, pointed face, 
and she gazed at nothing, morbidly, mournfully. 
If she recovers, it will be a long time before her 
nerves become normal. Beside her lay a little 
boy sick with measles, who cried pitifully for his 
mother. She was at work and the nurses were too 
busy with many sick children to go to one who 
merely wanted petting. Poor little baby ; one little 
boy crying for love — that hardly bears thinking 
of, far less the hundreds of children all over 
France whose mothers as well as fathers have 
gone, and who need not only love, but food, 
clothes, homes, education. 

Of the stories I heard, I give the three that in- 
terested me most, and I give them in the words 
of the central characters. I met a certain tall, 
beautiful woman who always wore purple. She 
reminded me of a fleur-de-lis; she was so pure in 
color and outline, so graceful. Mournful, too, 
and after I knew more about her I wondered at 
the depth of her sadness. For though she was a 
refugee and had lost her chateau, she had not 

226 



"WHEN THE GERMANS CAME" 

lost anyone she loved. Her husband, much her 
senior, was too old to serve, and she had no 
brothers. Also, she was a rich woman still. And, 
finally, she was very useful, working early and 
late for refugees who had lost their all. At last 
she spoke to me freely. 

" I am sad," she said, " because I have failed 
France. You know a little of my circumstances, 
— that we had, my husband and I, a beautiful 
chateau not far from Lille. To me the war came 
as an utter surprise. For several days my hus- 
band had been in Paris on business. I had with 
me his sister, who was ailing, and my mother. I 
was so distressed over the health of my sister-in- 
law that I did not read the papers. When the 
men were mobilized my husband telegraphed us 
to come to Paris. But the news of the war had 
made my sister-in-law worse. I felt as if she 
ought not to travel. I sent my mother to Paris 
under the care of a trusted servant, and I wrote 
to my husband for permission to remain for a few 
days. 

"The days rolled on, my sister-in-law did not 
improve, and we heard disquieting rumors of the 
march of the Germans. Again my husband tele- 
graphed me, and imperatively, to come. It was 
a day or two before I could get ready. We set 
out, my sister-in-law and I. The last train had 
gone. I got a cart and horse, and the horse died 
between the shafts when we were only a mile 
from the chateau. My old servant Anne and I 

227 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

carried my sister-in-law back to the chateau. In 
two days the Germans came. 

" The first to arrive were two under-officers in 
a car. Old Anne received them. I was in my 
sister-in-law's bedroom. I could hear the men 
tramping through the halls. They came to a stop 
outside the room where we were. I heard one of 
the Germans say to Anne, 

" ' A good enough house, this. We shall keep 
it for a hospital.' 

" Then he dashed open the door of the room 
and saw us. His eyes fastened on me, and he said, 
in a leering, hateful way, 

" ' I was saying to your woman, madame, that 
this shall be the officers' headquarters.' 

" Officers' headquarters ! A very different 
thing, that, from a hospital. For a moment I did 
not answer, and that made him angry, and he 
growled, 

" ' You ought to thank me ! If this is head- 
quarters your things will not be taken from you.' 

" Then I thought of my sick sister-in-law, and 
I forced myself to be polite to him. 

" ' I thank you,' I said. 

" Again he leered at me. 

" ' Come, now, you answer properly,' he said; 
' only be kind to the high officers, and you won't 
lose much by the war.' 

" Then those men went away. Next day the 
officers came with their servants. They took the 
best rooms. I had to move my sister-in-law up to 

228 



"WHEN THE GERMANS CAME" 

the servants' quarters, where I slept by her side. 
I can never make you realize what we went 
through. My chateau was safe at a time when 
my neighbors' houses were being burned or 
looted. And I had the blessing of hard work. 
For we had to feed those twenty men, and the 
food they demanded was of the best. Most of 
my servants had gone; I could find only two or 
three old women to help me. Anne and I did 
most of the work. 

" Ah, those officers ! Their arrogance ! Their 
filthy habits. They had their breakfasts in bed, 
and always old Anne served them. I avoided 
them as much as I could. Most of the time I 
stayed in the kitchen. But sometimes, in the first 
few days, they sent for me to question me. Ah, 
their veiled insults, their looks — 

" But later an officer came who seemed different 
from the rest. When he had talked with me he 
must have spoken to the others, for after that 
they did not trouble me. I begged to be allowed 
to go with my sister-in-law and old Anne to Paris. 
This he refused. Week after week we stayed 
there, with the dreariest of news from my be- 
loved France. Then, of a sudden, the officer told 
me that I was to be taken to a prison-camp in 
Germany of which he was to be Kommandantur. 
My sister-in-law and old Anne he would send 
to Paris. 

" It was a horrible journey to Germany, in 
cattle cars. I have come to believe since that 

229 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

other prisoners were treated worse than we, and 
that it was due to the influence of this Kom- 
mandantur that we had room to sit down in the 
cattle cars and food to eat. The barracks in 
which we lived was badly built and cold; the food 
was poor, and many of us had insufficient clothing. 

" I had been there a week when there arrived 
a friend from a village a little south of Lille. 
She had had word, after my chateau had been in- 
vaded, that my mother was ill in Paris. When 
next I saw the Kommandantur I begged him to let 
me go to Paris to care for my mother. 

" ' She may not be ill,' he said. ' Tell me her 
address and I will find out for you if she is ill.* 

" I was so distrait that it did not occur to 
me to wonder how he would gain this information. 
But in a few days he came to me and said, 

" ' You need not distress yourself. Your 
mother has been a little ill with pleurisy, but she 
is now well.' 

" I was grateful to him for this news, but still 
I begged to go back. He would not consent. But 
he was very gentle. He used to talk to me often 
of what a great country Germany was, and of the 
good she could be to her friends. 

" ' Why will you not be a friend of Germany? ' 
he said. ' What does it matter to a woman what 
flag her country waves? It is a man she should 
love, and that man's country should be hers.' 

" Madame, then I understood him, — very 
clearly. He meant that I should betray France, 

230 



"WHEN THE GERMANS CAME" 

should become a spy. He meant to make himself 
my protector. 

" ' Monsieur,' I said to him, ' I am loyal to 
France only. I am loyal to one man only. In 
these two particulars I can never change — never ; 
not though I were starved to death, not though I 
were beaten to death, not though I were burned 
at the stake ! ' 

" He left me, then. For a long time he did 
not come near me. He used to stand outside the 
enclosure that barred us in and stare at me. I 
would look back at him, steadfastly. Every line 
of his face I knew. I had so often looked at it 
to find softening. At last one day he came to 
see me. 

" * You shall go home,' he said; 'but try to 
remember, when you are in Paris, that I did my 
best for you.' 

" I need not tell you the happiness I felt at 
getting on the crowded cattle-car with other refu- 
gees, bound for home. What happiness to cross 
the border and be in Switzerland! What un- 
speakable joy to be once more on French soil; to 
hear that my beloved ones were safe ! For a little 
while I forgot the horror of the war. 

" And then, — I failed France. One day I was 
in the Metropolitan; the tram stopped at the sta- 
tion, and a man sat down opposite me. Idly I 
glanced at him, from the feet up. He wore the 
uniform of a French major of artillery. He had 
the croix de guerre pinned on his breast. I lifted 

231 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

my eyes to his face. It was the face of the Kom- 
mandantur of the prison camp. 

" And then, madame, I fainted. Then I failed 
France. If only I could have controlled my swim- 
ming senses, and clung to him till he was arrested, 
I could have delivered up an enemy, a spy. When 
I was revived from my faint he was gone. He has 
not been taken, and I — missed the chance to help 
France. Now you know the reason for my grief." 

A story characteristic of the goodness and self- 
lessness of a certain class of French people was 
told me alternately by Monsieur and Madame 

D as I sat in their little living-room in a 

suburb of Paris. She is slim, and quiet, with dark 
eyes full of tenderness and penetration. He is 
dark and florid and handsome, not looking at all 

the invalid he is. Madame D sewed at a 

little garment as she talked, and from a neighbor- 
ing room came the voices of children at play. 

Monsieur D is a clergyman. Before the 

war he had a church in Quievoy, near Cambrai. 

" Such a good church," said Madame D , 

her voice breaking a little; "such good parish- 
ioners. It hardly seemed possible that war could 
have come, that so many of the men of our church 
should be mobilized. My husband was mobil- 
ized, too, on the third of August — " 

She looked at him proudly, as if his words must 
be more important than hers, and he took up the 
tale. 

" I went to Paris, and from there, after a few 
232 



"WHEN THE GERMANS CAME" 

days by rail to Epinal, with a group consisting of 
two Catholic priests, one Jew, and a dozen 
stretcher-bearers. From there we marched to St. 
Die, and then to Saales, there entering Alsace. 
For us it was like a triumphal entry. We saw 
many German prisoners, for the battle at Pleane 
had already taken place. Among them was the 
son of the most important man of Saales, who, a 
German subject, had been an officer in the army. 
There he was, with his sword and his horse, de- 
lighted to be a prisoner. For, in his heart, he 
is French. We saw, too, the first German flag 
our men had taken. Very happy the people were, 
to think of Alsace coming back to France ! Yet 
they dared not betray their feelings too openly. 
Some who did the Germans afterwards shot. 

" Fighting was going on, three or four miles 
from Saales; and wounded men were coming in. 
We marched on, bringing many French and Ger- 
mans as we went. We won into German territory 
as far as Schirmeck. The Germans outflanked us 
there, but our group did not know it. We were 
told to turn north to Mont Donon. We kept 
meeting the French troops coming up singing. 
A dangerous march, that through the valley, for 
the French and Germans were shooting at each 
other across the tops of the hills. 

" What drama in the villages we passed, some 
of them so much more loyal than others ! One 
German officer, our prisoner, said to an officer, 
grimly, 

233' 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

" ' It is very strange that so many German- 
Alsatians become your prisoners so easily. After 
the war Germany will make them pay for this! " 

" ' By that time/ our officer replied, ' Germany 
may have to do a little paying herself.' 

" From one village a man had been telephoning 
our advance to German headquarters. The officer 
with us stopped to search for him. We entered 
a house, where there was a child of four or five. 

" ' Are you alone, little one? ' the officer asked. 

" * Oh, no; papa is in the cellar telephoning,' 
the baby said. 

" I hope he will never know that he betrayed his 
own father. It was hard to see the man shot. 
I thought of my own children. 

" In another village we caught a man in the 
railway station sending information to the Ger- 
mans. In all such cases there was but a brief 
court-martial. In still another, where we stayed 
for food, which we cooked and ate outdoors, we 
noticed an old man keeping sheep on the hill. We 
had nothing else to look at. Soon we saw that 
he was leading his sheep in a most erratic way. 
He was signalling to the Germans on the next 
hill. Again we were in a village and we looked 
up at the church tower to see the time. We saw 
the hands of the clock suddenly change position. 
So we searched, and found a spy in the tower. 
This may explain why clock towers are often de- 
stroyed now. 

" These spies, they are the curse of France ! 
234 



"WHEN THE GERMANS CAME" 

They go about in Paris dressed as women or as 
priests. They listen to the talk in the cafes. They 
hear soldiers tell when the regiments they belong 
to went to such and such a sector, when they left, 
where they are going next. All such information 
is invaluable to Germany. The quickness with 
which the spies transmit their news is amazing. 
A regiment I know well in Alsace was changed 
to a sector near Rheims, and the very hour it ar- 
rived in the trenches the Germans put up a big 
placard : ' A salutation to the soldiers of such 
and such a regiment.' But then, spying is a Ger- 
man virtue. 

" We retreated from Mont Donon through 
Badonviller, — it was hard going, with fighting 
all along the way, villages taken and retaken. I 
had had no word from my wife, and my anxiety 
was extreme, for I heard that the Germans had 
advanced to Cambrai. More and more we felt 
that it was a blunder to have gone to Alsace. We 
entered too quickly, — and then we were not pre- 
pared for such a war as this. If the thing could 
have been done with our spirit, — yes, indeed; 
but we had nothing at first to match the German 
guns. We should have waited for Alsace. And 
indeed even the Alsatians who are loyal are Alsa- 
tians before they are French. I think they would 
like autonomy. 

" Our work was hard. We had to carry so 
many wounded men. There were supposed to be 
four of us to each stretcher, but sometimes, when 

236 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

the casualties were numerous, we could use but 
two. Often we had to lift the stretcher shoulder 
high. One day I remember I helped to carry over 
two hundred men, the half of them Germans. 
I assure you it is as hard to carry one hundred 
Germans as it is three times the number of French. 
The Germans made so much more of a little 
wound; they would not speak, thought themselves 
quite finished. I lay the fact of my weak heart 
and bad health to the many heavy Germans I 
carried. 

"And the manners of the officers! One time 
I remember we had a wagon in which we put a 
few French and German privates. Then we car- 
ried up to it a German officer, rather seriously 
wounded in the shoulder. He refused to be put 
with privates, demanded that he should have the 
wagon to himself. When we put him in he tried 
to kick us. Our French officer had to threaten him 
with the revolver. I really believe some of our 
men would have killed him if the French officer 
had not been standing by. 

" So, day after day we retreated, bearing back 
the wounded, and hearing on all sides the bad 
news of German victories. And at last the pulling 
and straining in Alsace ceased ; the sector remained 
quiet. And I, still with no news from my wife, 
was sent to the trenches in Arras." 

Then Madame D took up the tale, her 

voice as restrained as her husband's had been. 

" After my husband had gone I did what I 
236 



"WHEN THE GERMANS CAME" 

could in the parish, but there was little I could do. 
What comfort I could give to the wives of the 
men who had gone I gave. I took all the money 
and papers belonging to the church, ready, in case 
anything happened, to give them to the chief 
vestryman. But we did not think anything could 
really happen. We did not dream of invasion. 

" What war news we read really told us little. 
I heard nothing of my husband; the other women 
heard nothing of their husbands and sons. We 
all assumed that our soldiers would soon be victo- 
rious, that the war would be over by the New 
Year. We waited. 

" On the twenty-fifth of August, at about eight 
in the morning, I was giving the three chil- 
dren their breakfast, when some French sol- 
diers appeared in my garden. How weary the 
poor fellows were, how dusty and distraught! 
They had no officers, no horses, no food, nothing. 
They looked at the children, and one of them 
said, 

" ' You must go at once, madame, with your 
little ones. We are in full retreat from Conde. 
There has been a battle, and the French have been 
defeated. Of our particular companies there are 
only one hundred and fifty left; there were a 
thousand. Not one officer remains.' 

" I gave them food and coffee, and went to the 
kitchen to prepare more, for I thought other tired 
soldiers would be coming. These men went off 
to St. Quentin, and then some English soldiers 

237 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

appeared. They, too, had been in a battle and 
had been defeated. But they did not show it. 
They were clean and smiling. They had not suf- 
fered as our poor soldiers. All they asked for 
was water. 

" They, too, told me to leave quickly, as the 
Germans would soon arrive. But how could I 
leave with the Frenchmen coming to me, hungry 
and exhausted! I sent my little six-year-old girl 
to the house of the vestryman with the church 
papers and the church money. I also sent the 
church silver. The brave little one; she made 
many journeys. Then, from eight until two I was 
serving the soldiers. 

" At two o'clock the men who were there said 
to me, 

" * But this is madness, madame. It is a matter 
of minutes now before the Germans come. You 
must go, if you are to get the last train to Paris.' 

" I had been so busy that I had not had time 
to collect any clothing for myself or the children. 
I put on their hats and walked out of the house, 
leaving it just as it was. I had not even time to 
bring the photographs of the children. I had 
just thirty francs in my purse. 

" There was a hay cart containing four families 
of peasants going to the train. They took me 
with them. So many people could not be per- 
suaded to leave. The farmers wanted to look 
after their crops. The shopkeepers wanted to 
guard their goods. Others said that if the Ger- 

238 



"WHEN THE GERMANS CAME" 

mans did come it would not be for days. We 
went over a road parallel to one along which the 
English artillery were fighting a retreat. Some- 
times our cart had to be put in a field while officers 
drove by, or soldiers marched by. 

" When we reached the station the last train was 
about to leave, and the French soldiers who 
were there literally threw us into the luggage 
vans. We were packed in tight, and we had to be 
shut in during the journey. Usually it takes 
three hours; but this time it took thirteen. When- 
ever the train stopped at a station English sol- 
diers took the children out and gave them water 
and chocolate. 

" Among the people in the van were three girls 
and their little brother, whom I took under my 
care. They belonged to a family of position. 
They had two brothers at the front, as well as 
the fiance of the eldest daughter. The parents 
would have come with them, except that the old 
grandfather was too ill to move. The parents 
had given the girls a thousand francs, all the 
money they had in the house, and had sent them 
to Paris. They thought the money would last 
till the war was over ! 

" Those girls were very sad, but they did not 
know what was before them. They had never 
done any work, never had any deprivations, never 
had any grief. For months they were in suspense 
about their people, hearing nothing. At last the 
fiance and one brother were taken prisoners. 

239 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

Through them the girls learned that the other 
brother had been wounded, and that their father 
and mother had been badly treated. When the 
Germans entered the house they demanded food 
of the mother. They held a revolver to the old 
grandfather's head, and said they would shoot 
him dead if she did not work quickly enough. 
While she was killing all the fowls she had, and 
baking cakes for them, they beat the husband 
black and blue. The couple thought the terror 
would surely kill the old grandfather, but he is 
better than he has been for years. Meantime, 
the three girls and their brother are half starving 
on their allowance of twenty-five cents a day each. 

" To go back to my own story. I arrived in 
Paris, with hordes of other refugees; but the 
German troops were drawing near Paris, so after 
two days they sent us south. The misery of that 
travel! We had nothing, and the weariness and 
terror made my children ill. My little girl was 
old enough to understand; the shock reacted on 
her delicate body. She grew more and more ill. 
Then I decided to go back to Paris, where I had 
friends. But it was too late for my little one. She 
died. 

" In Paris I took a little house, and kind people 
gave me things. Still I heard nothing of my 
husband. But I had to think of our parishioners, 
of those poor boys in the trenches, whose homes 
had been taken by the Germans, who knew nothing 
of their families. I wrote to the proper quarters, 

240 



"WHEN THE GERMANS CAME " 

and found out where this and that soldier was, 
until I had addresses which would reach them all. 
Then, every week I sent each a letter. I typewrote 
for them passages from my husband's sermons. 
Later on, when he got to Arras, he sent me a ser- 
mon every week, and I copied it for all the men. 
When they get their permissions they come here 
to us. They kiss us as if we were their parents. 
They are so glad to find my husband." 

Madame C again looked at her husband 

proudly. 

" They are glad to talk to me about their fami- 
lies," he said. " My wife and I are the nearest 
thing to home that they have. They talk of their 
hopes for the days after war. I think they have 
a deeper religious feeling even than they had. If 
they live they will make their lives count for 
righteousness. They long for life and for victory. 
And they are hopeful. They believe that in a 
few months now the war will end." 

The story that follows I give, despite its length 
and detail, because it is characteristic not only of 

the speaker, but of her class. Madame B is 

of the small shop-keeping class; her husband was 
a commercial traveller. At the time the war 
broke out they were living in Rheims. She is 
good-looking, vivid, practical, shrewd, voluble, a 
little excitable, and full of energy which she gives 
the effect of holding in suspension, until the war 
shall end. 

241 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

"On the first of August, 19 14, at seven 
o'clock," she said, " my husband came back to our 
home in Rheims from the tour he had been mak- 
ing in the Marne, the Aisne, and the Ardennes. 
Leaving him in charge of the two children, Pau- 
lette, aged six, and Violette, aged seven months, 
I went out. Arriving at the corner of the Fau- 
bourg Ceres, I heard the sound of a drum. There 
was something menacing in the sound. Like all 
the others, I ran to the barracks. It was the an- 
nouncement of the general mobilization of our 
soldiers. 

" What a scene ! To me it was like a thunder- 
bolt. The men were quiet, but the women wept, 
crying, 

'"It's war! War!' 

" I saw my brother-in-law and his wife. He 
said to me, 

" ' Is Louis back? When is he going? He is 
mobilized, of course.' 

" Louis ! I had not thought of that. Half 
mad, I ran home. But as I entered the house, 
and saw my husband playing with the children, I 
restrained my tears. 'You heard the drum?' 
'No, why?' 'It's war.' He leaped to his 
feet. 'War?' 'Yes, they have called a gen- 
eral mobilization. They are putting up the plac- 
ards which give the details.' 

" I began to weep, and to embrace my little 
girls. The elder wept with me. My husband 
tried to console me. 

242 



"WHEN THE GERMANS CAME" 

" * Mobilization does not necessarily mean war/ 
he said. ' Perhaps it is done by way of precau- 
tion. In any case, I must go to the barracks be- 
fore noon and ask for a couple of days of grace.' 

" In a few days my husband was mobilized, 
but I did not have to part from him at once be- 
cause his regiment was to stay in Rheims to guard 
the forts. This gave me time to get used to the 
thought of our separation. He would not be 
going immediately into danger, and that the Ger- 
mans might come to Rheims never entered my 
head. Besides, I thought the war could only last 
a few months. 

" The soldiers marched away from Rheims, 
singing and shouting, ' To Berlin ! ' We took 
courage; some people still wept, but more were 
resigned, and we all had confidence in our soldiers 
who had gone away so bravely. 

" Towards the end of August various refugees 
from Belgium and from the Ardennes passed 
through Rheims on their way to Paris. Poor 
people, leaving their homes, bringing with them 
children and old parents, not knowing what the 
future would have in store for them, — we wept 
for them, little thinking that some day we should 
be in like case. About this time my husband was 

obliged to go to the fort at . Hearing that 

the Germans were at , he advised us to go 

away, because he wanted to feel certain that we 
were safe. Already we heard such terrible things 
of the Germans, — that they were without pity 

243 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

for women and children, that we should have 
everything to fear from them. My father and 
mother wanted me to go with the children and 
with my sister. I wanted them to come, too, but 
they said that old people had nothing to fear. 
When, by September the second, we heard that 
the Germans would reach us in two days, my 
mother entreated me to go for the sake of the 
children. 

" I agreed to go at three o'clock that afternoon, 
taking my sister with me. Many terrified people 
were at the station to take the train to Epernay. 
It was half past ten when we arrived, and there 
was no train for Troyes, where we meant to go. 
There was no hotel open where we could pass the 
night, no place where we could buy food. We had 
a cousin there with whom we had been on bad 
terms for a long time. We went to her house just 
the same; it was war and we were hungry; she 
would not close the door on us. Indeed, she re- 
ceived us well and gave us of her best. Next day 
at three o'clock we went to the train. It was not 
to start till nine, could take only sixty passengers, 
and four thousand were waiting for it ! Oh, that 
waiting in the station under a burning sun. The 
children were ill! My Paulette nearly fainted 
with fear and weariness and fever. My sister 
carried her out in the air and revived her. My 
cousin and her son, a boy of seventeen, begged us 
to come back to their house. 

" Then what did we see ! Germans coming in 
244 



"WHEN THE GERMANS CAME" 

with a flag of truce to Epernay, their eyes ban- 
daged ! The crowd rushed upon their automobile. 
But a French officer standing in their car threat- 
ened the people with his sword. They cried, 
' Kill them.' Oh, that terrible cry, and our own 
soldiers leaping from the windows of the station! 
The car was forced to go back. We returned 
with my cousin for something to eat. My sister 
wanted to stay, but I thought we should go. We 
waited till four o'clock and then we set out on 
foot for Troyes. 

" My baby was in her carriage and was com- 
fortable. But Paulette had to walk. She did not 
complain, but we could see that she was afraid of 
all that she had heard about these barbarians. 
The road was black with people, bound for 
Troyes. We walked on and on, but then we had 
to stop, for the news met us that the Germans 
were on our side of the road, the French in am- 
buscade on the other, and that presently we 
should be between two fires. What was going 
on in the midst of those innocent fields and vines 
at which we looked ! We had to go back to Eper- 
nay and to our cousin. 

" Next morning we heard that the Germans 
were at hand. All along I had been thinking how 
my baby had not been baptized. We had been 
waiting for my sister's fiance to come back from 
his military service for the ceremony. But now 
I determined to wait no longer, and I found a 
priest who would baptize Violette. What a sad 

245 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

baptism! Where was my husband? Where was 
my sister's fiance? For all we knew, they might 
be only a few miles from us, but separated by 
the hordes of our enemies bearing down upon 
us. My sister was the godmother. Hardly was 
the ceremony finished before we heard loud music. 
It was the Germans, chanting their victory. But 
we wept at that music, for it meant that all those 
Germans were going to fight against and perhaps 
kill our dear soldiers. For the first time we 
seemed to understand what war meant. 

" The mayor of Epernay passed through the 
streets to reassure the people. He told us to do 
nothing and say nothing and then we should have 
nothing to fear. A German officer then came and 
ordered us to keep our doors wide open. We 
could hear firing outside the town. Some civilians 
were killed and some made prisoners. We heard 
all sorts of rumors, — that the Germans were 
killing those who resisted them; that Rheims was 
being bombarded. 

" We wished we were back in Rheims. What 
was the use of having come to see the Boches at 
Epernay when we could just as well have seen 
them at Rheims? And what had become of our 
dear parents ! My sister reproached me for hav- 
ing blundered and I told her that if she had made 
up her mind quickly we should have been far away 
from Epernay by this time. 

" Four days later we had to pass among a group 
of Germans. We were afraid of them. They 

246 



"WHEN THE GERMANS CAME" 

smiled at us. One of them invited me to mount 
up beside him on his horse and said, ' Pretty- 
Frenchwoman.' Another offered us bread, hor- 
rible black bread. My young cousin pushed it 
away, saying, ' I '11 never eat that stuff ! ' The 
German turned on him with furious eyes and 
threatened him. To calm the German I took the 
bread and gave a bit to my little girl and told him 
it was good. That contented him and he went on 
his way. * Yes,' I thought, ' go on your way. 
I 've seen enough of you.' We had to expostu- 
late with our cousin, but he would not listen to 
anything, saying that he wanted to see the Ger- 
mans get out, and that he 'd like to take them to 
Berlin with our soldiers. 

" It seemed that someone, concealed in the 
grape vines, had fired a shot at the Germans, and 
for that the city was obliged to pay a big sum in 
gold. The authorities had much ado to find it. 
Further, the Germans requisitioned food for 
themselves and their horses. By and by the 
city grew quieter, and people began to appear in 
the streets. 

" I went with Paulette into a store. A German, 
about forty years old, was there. As he passed 
out he patted Paulette's head. She recoiled and 
grew pale. He looked at her sadly and said, 

" ' Don't be afraid. I would n't hurt you. I 
have four little children at Berlin, ten, seven, 
four, and one they are. I want to see them again. 
I shall feel foolish in Paris.' 

247 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

" He was certainly not wicked, thinking as he 
was of his children, whom he hoped to see again. 
If all the Germans had been like that one there 
would have been fewer little victims. 

" On this same day we heard that the Germans 
were leaving free the country towards Rheims. 
We went to the Maine for permission to go, and 
a German captain gave it to us. At nine next 
morning we thanked our cousin for her kindness 
to us, and took the road that led to Rheims. We 
had two carriages this time, that Paulette might 
be less weary. We had over twenty miles to go. 
We stopped only for a quarter of an hour once to 
eat. All along the road we passed troop after 
troop of the Germans, but these men did not sing. 
They looked wretched, more like animals than 
men. They had not the air of conquerors like 
the first ones we saw. But even the first ones, 
for all that they were strong and tall, did not have 
the spirit and chic of our Frenchmen. The sol- 
diers we passed were going to help their comrades 
in what has since been called the battle of the 
Marne. 

" At about half past two we saw Rheims. 
There rose up the towers of the Cathedral. In 
the suburbs people asked us whence we had come, 
and if we knew anything of how the battle was 
going. We did not doubt that our troops had re- 
pulsed the enemy, but we could not be sure ! We 
were told that Rheims had been bombarded a 
few days before and that several people had been 

248 



"WHEN THE GERMANS CAME" 

killed. We hurried; what if our dear parents had 
been hurt ! But they were safe and well, and re- 
joiced to see us. 

" The next day we were so exhausted that we 
could scarcely move, and Paulette had a fever, but 
the day after I went out to see what was happen- 
ing, and to buy some things I needed. As I had 
a good way to go I took my bicycle. I was near 
the northern end of the city, and far from home, 
when I almost ran into a drove of Germans. 
They were entering Rheims ! What to do ! As 
best I could I turned ! I hurried. I should have 
flown if I could. The soldiers ran after me, and 
shouted something I did not understand. I 
shouted, ' Don't stop me, please.' A big Boche 
ran after me, but pretty soon he was obliged to 
stop, his companions laughing at him. I assure 
you I did not laugh. I rode like the wind, and 
suddenly in front of me I saw another group of 
German soldiers. I had either to get off the 
bicycle or ride among them. But the street was 
down hill and I was going furiously. I rang my 
bell loudly to show I wanted room to pass. I hit 
one of the Germans, but I did not fall off. He 
groaned loudly; but on I went, turned a corner, 
and, in fine, got home at last. 

" So then the Germans were in Rheims. Let 
me say that I saw no signs of atrocities com- 
mitted in Rheims, though I heard of many as 
happening in neighboring regions. In Rheims 
the Germans only robbed, particularly in the 

249 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

houses from which the people had fled. They 
took everything to Germany, from dishes to cham- 
pagne, from personal property to biscuits. 

" Next day and the next we heard guns near at 
hand, and we hoped we were to be delivered. We 
believed that a battle was going on at our very 
gates. It came nearer. What if the Germans 
should be the victors? What if there should be 
fighting in the streets? There came companies 
of German artillerymen and infantrymen who 
had lost their way. They asked the road to 
Presnes, Neuchatel, and Vitry, threatening with 
their revolvers those who did not wish to reply. 
A Uhlan officer asked a little boy the way to 
the Pierquin farm. The child said he did not 
know. The German pushed the revolver up 
against the little one's face. He was about to 
answer by guess when a young man indicated the 
route. The Boche made him march with them. 

" Towards night the firing stopped. Next day 
I heard troops passing. I looked out. What 
joy! They were French. Rheims was retaken! 
We had many German prisoners. Our brave little 
soldiers were very tired and hungry. We fed 
them; we embraced them; we laughed, and we 
cried, and we questioned them about this and that 
regiment. Paulette cried with disappointment, 
for, on seeing these soldiers, she thought she 
would see her father. Alas, I did not know 
where he was. 

" On the fourteenth of September, while we 
250 



"WHEN THE GERMANS CAME" 

were at table, a great noise made us leap to our 
feet. A shell fell in a factory across the road 
from us, which was being used as a hospital. Sev- 
enty wounded men were there. We heard them 
calling, and we ran out to help them, my sister and 
I being the first ones in the street. What a hor- 
rible spectacle ! A white-clad nurse red with her 
own blood. Men who had had slight wounds 
now with limbs gone ! Twenty-one dead. I shall 
always see that horror ! We put those still alive 
in an ambulance, and a few minutes later that, too, 
was bombarded. 

" My poor Paulette. She had seen it all. She 
kept crying, ' They will kill my papa, those terrible 
Bodies.' We ran to an alley while the bombard- 
ment went on, knocking down houses, killing old 
men, women, and children. Day after day the 
bombardments continued. We went to a safe 
quarter of the town, but oh, the misery of seeing 
the ruins, of seeing the flames from our burning 
Cathedral. Soon it was hard to get food. We 
had to stand in line for hours. Then we began to 
lack money. 

" My sister went to Epernay to sell something, 
but when she had accomplished this she fell ill. 
After a month she was better, but her money was 
gone. She asked permission to go back to Rheims. 
It was refused. So at night she slipped back 
across the fields. 

" We talked of going away, but my father had 
become paralyzed. He said we should have to 

251 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

leave him behind. What an anguish of choice. 
I wanted to stay with him, but I was afraid, and 
I wanted to save my children. The baby, Vio- 
lette, was happy. She laughed at the sound of the 
shells, and cried, ' Bourn ! ' But Paulette under- 
stood. She never complained, but she could not 
eat. She was sick from fear. 

" One night when I was out with Paulette we 
heard a great bombardment in the direction of 
the home of my parents. Paulette became half 
mad, screaming that they were killed. Later my 
mother came to reassure the child. Next day I 
was knocked down by a shell. When I arose I 
was standing among fourteen women and children, 
all dead. I got home more dead than alive. 
Always bombarded; Paulette sick; it was enough; 
we must go. We applied for permits to leave 
Rheims. 

" When we set out, shells were falling every- 
where, and there was an artillery duel between 
our soldiers and the Germans. Paulette was 
half insane, but Violette laughed and held out 
her arms to the moon. Suddenly a shell crashed 
down and I saw Paulette fall. I ran to her and 
picked her up. She was covered with dust, but 
she had no wound. She screamed horribly, and 
then became unconscious. It was two hours be- 
fore I could revive her. 

" Somehow I got a carriage. We put in my 
paralyzed father and my mother, who was sick 
with a terrible cold. We wrapped her in a quilt. 

252 



"WHEN THE GERMANS CAME" 

My sister took care of one child and I the other. 
We drove to Bezamere to get the train to Paris. 
We had to stay in it all night and then change 
cars. How we did it I shall never know, with two 
helpless old people, two children, and a valise. 
Such misery — and hours later, Paris, and the 
kind ladies of the Red Cross to help us. 

" And this is what the Germans have done to 
us : they have driven us from our home ; my mother 
is sick; my father is sick; my Paulette is so ill that 
she has had to be taken to a sanitarium. My 
husband has been twice in the hospital, the second 
time with a very bad wound, and my sister's 
fiance is killed. We can only wait for victory, and 
for the end of this accursed war." 



253 



CHAPTER XIV 

The Little Autobiographies 

I GIVE you the stories of these children as they 
told them to me or wrote them for me, — 
little refugees whose homes were suddenly 
changed from places of peace and safety to 
places of blood and terror. Good people have 
done their best for these little ones, but a child's 
life cannot fail to be deeply scarred by the loss 
of home, of father, perhaps of mother; of sepa- 
ration from brothers and sisters and from old 
associations. Despite the most exquisite tender- 
ness and care it has taken more than three years 
to soothe the look of fear from the eyes of the 
little refugees, though, fortunately, the faith of 
young children and their trust in life is strong. 
But often, when a child is playing, a sudden noise, 
or perhaps the flash of sunlight on some bright 
object, will make it stop short with a gasp of 
terror. Old horrors spring out upon it and it 
rushes to its mother or to some teacher or play- 
mate to make sure it is in unconquered France, — 
safe. I have seen thousands of such children 
whom France is rearing for the new nation, hun- 
dreds of them weakened by exposure and shock, 
all of them precious, each of them a convincing 
argument against any future war. 

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THE LITTLE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 

These children will often talk freely about their 
experiences to their playmates and teachers, and 
even to a stranger. The autobiography of a 
child is always touching — perhaps because we 
elders find something odd and innocent in a little 
one's sense of values. But no autobiography can 
be so poignant as that of a child that has lost, by 
violence, its home. 

Little seven-year-old Simone told me her story 
in a large light workroom in Paris, where her 
mother, with many other women, was sewing on 
soldiers' clothes to supplement her state allow- 
ance of twenty-five cents a day for herself, and 
ten cents for Simone. Children were not al- 
ways allowed in the workroom, but the mother 
needed the comfort of the little girl's nearness. 
The woman was dark, with bright mournful 
eyes, but the child's hair was yellow, and her 
eyes blue and translucent. Simone sat on my 
lap with her arm uncomfortably tight about my 
neck. 

" Simone, you will choke madame," her mother 
said, lifting her mournful eyes from her work. 
" Since the Germans came Simone holds one very 
tight." 

" You were not afraid, Simone, when the Ger- 
mans came? " I asked. 

" No, madame," Simone replied, " because 
mamma held my hand, so I knew nothing could 
hurt me." 

Many of the smallest French and Belgian refu- 
255 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

gees say that: "I was safe because I was with 
mamma." 

" We had a pretty house," Simone chattered, 
her fair head on my shoulder. " Papa and 
mamma and I lived in it and the bird and the 
dog. We had a garden for me to play in. The 
bird's cage hung on a nail beside the window, 
and he watched me running after the dog. My 
papa used to play with me, but one day he had 
to go away to fight. We saw him go to the train 
with the other soldiers, and they were all singing. 
The dog liked to stay with papa and whined when 
he went away, and used to go to the door and 
look down the street to see if papa would not come 
back. But afterwards he played with me. To- 
morrow I will write a letter to papa." 

The face of Simone's mother contracted in a 
tragic spasm and she turned away her head, while 
heavy tears fell on her work. That to-morrow 
will be put off for Simone until she ceases to speak 
of her father. He died on the Somme for France, 
and Simone will never carry a bead wreath to his 
grave. The machine whirred fiercely under the 
trembling hands of Simone's mother, and the child 
said, 

" Great noises came, and that was the Ger- 
mans, and one day mamma said, ' You must not 
play any longer in the garden,' and then she said, 
* You must come and sleep in the cellar.' Did 
you ever sleep in a cellar, madame? " 

" No, Simone." 

256 



THE LITTLE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 

" I did not like it in the cellar. It was always 
dark even when there was the sun outside. One 
day mamma woke me, and it was dark. She said, 
* Come, we must go.' She dressed me, and we 
went out in the street, and there was still the big 
noise and houses falling down. Mamma locked 
the door and she said, ' We are going away for 
a long time,' and I said, ' What will the bird and 
the dog do ? ' So mamma opened the door of the 
cage and she said perhaps he would fly out when 
it was sunlight. The dog came with us but we 
lost him." 

Simone's mother made a gesture which meant 
that the dog had been killed. 

" The street was full of fallen houses and 
wounded people," she whispered rapidly; "Simone 
walked with her head under my shawl." 

" Mamma said I walked well, but it was so 
far," Simone said. 

" She walked fifty miles; we were in the Ar- 
gonne region," Simone's mother explained. 

" That is why I wear this," said the child, point- 
ing to an imitation croix de guerre on her breast, 
" and because I am a good girl always now." 

I made the conventional response of the perfect 
adult, and Simone went on, 

" Madame, there are little girls here who 
looked back at their houses and they had all fallen 
down. It is very sad that so many people will 
have no houses to go to when the Germans are 
driven out of our country. But our house will be 

257 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

there. Do you know why it will be there, 
madame? Because mamma has the key in her 
pocket/' 

In one of the four little Montessori schools 
established and supported in Paris by Miss May 
Cromwell of New York as her contribution to 
France, I found a group of little French and Bel- 
gian children, anxious to chatter of their experi- 
ences. The small mother of the class, fat, blonde 
Madeleine Mahiere of Popernighe, Belgium, 
leaned against me on one side, while on the other 
leaned Marcel Houard of Arras. 

" Do you like it in France, Madeleine? " 

" Belgium was better till the Germans came," 
she said. " We did not think they would come 
so soon. My grandmother was old and my aunt 
was sick, and my father was at the war and my 
mother had six children. My mother said, ' Some 
of these children cannot walk at all, and none of 
them can walk far. I do not think the Germans 
will come yet.' " 

" But they did come," said Marcel Houard, 
" and I saw a big Boche that — " 

Madeleine calmly raised her voice to show 
that she was against any invasion of her conver- 
sation. 

" My mother got up early one day to make 
cakes," she continued, " and soon she came to 
wake us and said that we must hurry away for 
the Germans were coming. We heard so much 
shooting and we were afraid. Grandmother 

258 



THE LITTLE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 

cried, and said why did the good God make an 
old woman live through two wars. My aunt was 
wrapping up food to take. And oh, madame, 
there was no time to eat any of the cakes, and 
my aunt forgot to take them out of the oven and 
so they were left behind." 

Madeleine mourned for a moment over the 
cakes, and then said, 

" When we got into the street my mother 
carried the two youngest, and put us in front of 
her, and the shells were all falling. I heard my 
grandmother scream, and my mother said to me, 
' Don't look behind,' but I did look behind and 
grandmother was lying on the ground with her 
hand on her knee, and my aunt's face was all cov- 
ered with blood, and she was on the ground too, 
only she did not scream. My mother said we 
could not wait for them. So when we got to the 
little trenches our soldiers had made we walked 
in them. I carried my doll and held my little 
brother's hand. We had nothing to eat, for my 
grandmother and aunt had all the food and they 
did not come. I don't know where they are. We 
were tired and we all cried. So then we got into 
a train and the baby died. And oh, madame, on 
the train I broke my doll, and mamma made me 
throw it away." 

" Me," cried Marcel, seizing his turn, " we 
lived in Arras for more than a year in the cellar. 
All our window-glass was broken. We would go 
down and undress in the cellar and go to bed there, 

259 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

and we ate there. I had a little piano I played 
with. The Boches have it now." 

"Did you have plenty to eat, Marcel?" 

" Meat and potatoes and salad, and it was cold 
in the cellar, and one day the house fell down. 
So we went to Rheims and lived in another cellar. 
I went to school in a cellar too. In the cellar in 
Rheims where I slept, my mother let me keep my 
rabbits. But one of them was killed." 

" How was your rabbit killed, Marcel? " 

Marcel was busy moulding clay into a basket 
shape, but he stopped to gesticulate. 

"I let him go into the street to play — so. 
And a shell came — so. There was a man walk- 
ing along the street and he heard a shell and he 
said, ' That is not mine.' But it was his, and he 
was killed. The shell killed a woman and my 
rabbit. The French soldiers came and took the 
woman away in a wheelbarrow, but they left my 
rabbit. I ran out to get it and we had to eat it 
for supper. There were many dead horses, but 
no one ate them." 

A chorus of little voices began to talk of the 
dead horses, — grotesque and merciful it is that 
they have scant realization of the meaning of 
death to human beings. Ten-year-old Cecile had 
been listening to the smaller children with an in- 
dulgent superior air. 

" I," she said, " it is I who have spoken to the 
Boches. I, too, was in Rheims, but in our quarter 
of the city we were not afraid of the bombs. 

260 



THE LITTLE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 

Scarcely more than five fell in our quarter, but 
we slept outdoors in front of our house. Then 
one fell in the street and did a good deal of dam- 
age; so then we went into the cellar, and all the 
time the barbarous Germans were shelling our 
beautiful Cathedral. Then the Germans came 
into the city, and they stood in front of our houses, 
and when we wanted to go out to buy food they 
would not let us." 

" Sensible little girls stay indoors when the Ger- 
mans have come," said Madeleine, firmly. 

" My little sister and I," pursued Cecile, se- 
renely, " we went among them to see what they 
were like. Some of them were nice and some of 
them were wicked. One day I went for a walk 
and a German called to me. He spoke to me in 
his own language and I did not understand a word 
he said. I think he wanted me to make him some 
coffee. But I am afraid of going among strangers 
whom I do not know. So I ran away, but he ran 
after me to kill me, I think. He caught me at the 
end of the railway, but I cried as loud as I could, 
' Mamma, come and help me ! ' Then the German 
gave me a hard box on the ear and let me go. 
After that some bombs fell in our street. Our 
poor neighbor was going out to buy bread and a 
bomb hurt her; she fell down beside a house that 
was half in ruins. We lifted her up and went 
with her to the hospital, and two days later she 
died." 

" If people would stay in the houses they would 
261 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

not get boxes on the ears and they would not get 
hit with bombs," said Madeleine, primly. 

" Me — I like to see what goes on," Cecile re- 
joined. " Sometimes the German aeroplanes 
came over the city; then the people hid among the 
trees and looked up at them and so did I, and I 
am still alive. That same day we made a swing, 
and the rope broke; but we were able to mend it." 

" We have a swing, madame," said Marcel, 
" and toys, too; see, madame! " 

Well for the little ones that they can be diverted 
easily, and that they do not understand all they 
have lost. When older children write of their 
experiences their sense of proportion seems less 
grotesque. The effect is very definitely seen, too, 
of the life to which they have been transplanted 
and of the teaching of the nuns. But whoever 
reads sympathetically between the lines will see 
the deep traces of ineradicable fear, of human 
losses for which no tenderest fostering can ever 
quite atone. 

The following autobiographies were written by 
children from various parts of Belgium and 
France, aged from nine to thirteen years, most of 
them now in a refuge at Nemours, supported by 
Mrs. Francis Shaw of Boston, who ever since the 
war began has given devoted service to France. 

" My Life During the War," by A. Ceiche, 
aged eleven. 

" I lived at Nazelle when war was declared. 
We have all suffered so much since then. I saw 

262 



THE LITTLE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 

the soldiers in the trains the day they left, and 
they were all singing; but I have not heard them 
singing any more since that day. Some of them 
will never come back. My brothers all went away 
to the war, and one of them is dead. I have an- 
other brother who had bronchitis, but he had to 
go back. He told me that the bullets sang in his 
ears. I have another brother whose feet were 
frozen, but he went back to the front, too, because 
he did not have them cut off. I have a sister 
whom I shall never see again because she was 
pitchforked by the Germans and also her two little 
children, aged five and two-and-a-half years. Her 
husband is a Belgian. I am very unhappy at 
having had to leave my parents and come here for 
they have had so much trouble. I have a sister 
from whom I have not heard since the war began. 
We used to be very happy at Nizelles. When I 
had to leave the good sisters took care of me. 
I hope I shall see my father and mother again. I 
hope my brothers will come back in good health 
from the war and that I shall see them again. 
I pray to the good Jesus for them. They are 
very kind to me here at Nemours. I pray for 
them and I love them very much." 

Time has not done very much for that sad little 
boy nor for the little girl whose history follows : 

" My Life During the War," by Gabrielle 
Fouquet, aged twelve. 

" On the first of September, 19 14, we left our 
house because the Germans were coming, and we 

263 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

left without being able to take anything with us. 
We took refuge wherever we could, and often 
people refused to give us lodging. And we went 
as far as Croyes, and when the Prussians invaded 
there we went to the district near by to see if we 
could find work. I went always to school, and 
when I got home I would help mamma, and when 
she fell sick I helped my sister, and when she 
went out on an errand I took care of mamma, and 
when she was thirsty I made her a hot drink, and 
I worked a little for the lady in whose house we 
stayed. When mamma died I was very sad be- 
cause she was good to us. And when papa saw 
that we were all alone and that he could not 
find any more work there, we went far away to 
another district, and papa placed me with a hosier 
and he put my sister in another place, and he took 
care of my brother. I went always to school, 
and when there was no school I found herbs for 
the rabbits and after that I played. On Sundays 
I could see my sister, who was a maid in the 
neighboring country. One day we got a letter 
that papa was dead. That made me very unhappy. 
Then some American ladies came, and they went 
to see the lady who kept the school, and she spoke 
to them about me. One day I went to see my 
sister and she told me that I was to be taken away. 
When she said that I cried, because I was sad at 
not having my parents any more, and now they 
were taking me away from her. She said that 
the ladies had asked her if she wanted me to go, 

264 



THE LITTLE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 

and she said she did because they told her I should 
be left with the sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, who 
were very kind. I was very sad when I left my 
sister, but since I have come here I have not been 
sad for the sisters are so kind. They teach us 
how to work, and we go for walks among the 
rocks, for there are plenty of rocks where I am 
now. 

" God has been good to shelter me from want. 
I thank from the bottom of my heart the people 
he has chosen to replace my dear parents, and, 
above all, Madame Shaw, who is so good to us." 

Little Marie Guirard, aged nine, plunges into 
the middle of her autobiography. 

" It was terrible to have to leave our poor Saint 
Mihiel ! It was in September the twenty-fourth, 
1 9 14. We went to the train where many people 
had already taken their tickets. Mamma was 
holding out her hand for her ticket, when all at 
once two aeroplanes appeared. They dropped 
bombs on the gas plant and on the railway station. 
The gas plant fell down. There was a poor man 
who cried out, ' Save yourselves if you can,' and 
he pointed out the road. A poor little boy had 
his hand cut by a piece of shell, and he cried, 
' Mamma ! Mamma ! ' Mamma looked to see 
if it was one of us. When we got on the road we 
saw the guns firing upon the Germans. We could 
scarcely make a step along the road without com- 
ing on a dead body. We went to another place 
where there was a train, but they told us that train 

265 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

was not for refugees but for soldiers. Then we 
walked almost a mile under bombardment to an- 
other place, where we stayed. My uncle had 
written us that we must come to Paris. After a 
time we got to Paris. There was a very good 
lady who was kind to us and she asked the com- 
mittee if I could go to the country. I thank the 
committee for taking me to the country and the 
nuns who have been so good to me. I ought to 
be very obedient and not cry, for it would trouble 
my mother and my father, and my good benefac- 
tress, Madame Shaw, if I were not a good girl, 
and also the mother superior and my teachers. 
So I am going to be good always so as not to 
trouble them, and I am very grateful to them." 

Good little children who nearly always remem- 
ber their manners ! Germaine Desmedt, aged 
ten, forgets hers in her eagerness to talk of her 
brothers. 

" I have five brothers who went to war. There 
is one who disappeared the fourth of August and 
one who is a prisoner in Germany and one who 
is at Verdun. He got a bullet in his stomach. 
There is one who was in Serbia, and he wrote that 
he did not see how he was going to stand the hot 
weather. When war was declared I went to live 
at my aunt's house. But the Germans came there, 
and they killed a little girl because she said, 
' Down with the Germans ! ' But the English 
came and made the Germans go away. We gave 
coffee to the English and they stay there now. 

266 



THE LITTLE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 

We went to Paris, and in Paris they put me in a 
house that was for all the refugees. I stayed 
there eight days. Then we went away and got 
a room for five francs. Afterwards my sister and 
my grandmother came and got a room and they 
paid six francs. Then I had to leave mamma and 
go, with my little brother Baptiste, to Lyons." 

" When the war broke out," writes Henriette 
Pouyard, aged thirteen, " I was in boarding- 
school at Puteaux. I was playing in the highest 
of spirits at the moment when they told me that 
war was declared. I cried and was unhappy be- 
cause the next Sunday papa came to tell me good- 
bye, saying that he had to go to the front. On 
December the twenty-fifth was the great battle of 
the Marne. Papa was in it and the Boches cut his 
right leg, and I have an uncle who was missing 
and another who was wounded three times. 
When I was in the rue Bobillot one Wednesday 
at three o'clock, there was a manufactory in the 
next street making shells. Some shells were in a 
wagon, and one of them became displaced and 
made all the others burst. The factory burned, 
and they took me away to the creche. I was 
playing in the court of the creche with some little 
ones, when all at once I heard a loud noise. A 
little girl and I looked up and we saw tiles falling. 
A piece of glass fell on that little girl's head, but 
nothing hit me. I got the little ones and we all 
ran into the creche to see if there was anyone hurt 
there. The school was nearly burned down and 

267 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

some of the children were wounded. All the 
wounded people were taken to a hospital and to 
the pharmacy, and there were many dead in the 
streets, and all the glass was broken in the rue 
Bobillot up as far as the Place d'ltalie, to say 
nothing of the other streets. There was plenty 
of damage done. Two officers picked up a shell 
and then let it fall; it burst before their eyes and 
killed them. I was afraid the night after this. 
Now I am happy because of the ladies and sisters 
who take care of me as if I were their own child, 
and I am especially happy since I came to Ne- 
mours. I have everything I want and I thank 
you for your kindness to me." 

Evidently little G. Loth has found it necessary 
to remind his little companions of the advantages 
of his nationality, for he begins, 

" I love best of all the Belgian flag for that is 
the flag of my own country. I was in Belgium 
when the war broke out. My father and mother 
are dead. The good Sisters of St. Vincent de 
Paul took me to the train, for we wanted to get 
away from the bombardment. But there were 
Germans there, and one of them put his sabre 
at my throat and I was afraid. The nuns then 
took us to a house and there were more than a 
hundred children. All night long the Germans 
passed and they kept knocking at our door so that 
we had to go down to the cellar in our bare feet. 
The Belgian flag was floating, and when the Ger- 
mans saw it they were angry and they yelled. 

268 



THE LITTLE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 

Many of the children in the house became sick 
because they were afraid of the cannon. I wish 
I could have news of my sister. I have heard 
nothing from her at all, and I should like to be 
able to write her a few tender words. She had 
to have her first communion in black because my 
parents were dead. Her name is Suzanne. There 
was a little Belgian girl who saw her brother 
among the soldiers, and she cried and cried, and 
he cried too, and said, ' I shall see you again, my 
dear little girl; do not cry.' We went to Paris, 
and I stayed with my aunt for a long time, till 
she sent me here. I forgot to tell you that when 
the French soldiers went by they told us if any 
Germans came there we were to pull their ears. 
But they have burned down that house I used to 
live in, and I do not know where I shall go after 
the war is over. We went to Nazelle for Christ- 
mas, and they gave us a big box of chocolate 
bonbons. I am always praying for the war to 
be finished and that I may never see the Boches 
again, for they have a fierce and wicked manner. 
May God protect the poor emigrant children of 
the War of 19 14, and reward the charitable 
people who take care of us, the sisters, and Mad- 
ame Shaw, our benefactress, who comes to see 
us often and always brings us something. Many 
children are not so fortunate as we are." 

Follows another little story of the bombard- 
ment of Rheims, by Marcelles Landes, aged 
twelve. 

269 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

" The day of mobilization all the soldiers went 
away singing. When it was my papa's turn every- 
one wept with us for him as they did also for my 
uncle. Then things went quietly enough, until 
one day when we heard that the Prussians were 
entering Rheims. I was at the house of our em- 
ployer when I saw many people coming, as 
mamma was, to call their children. We hurried 
away, and at the same moment we saw a band of 
Prussians coming with their revolvers held ready 
to fire at anyone who said anything. The next 
day there was new terror, for we heard a strange 
whistling, and then we saw that there was fire in 
the English factory. The work people came out, 
crying, c Hide yourselves; it is the bombs.' After 
the bombardment we ran out, for we scarcely 
understood what had happened, and then we saw 
fallen houses and wounded people weltering in 
their blood. 

" One day we rushed out into the street to find 
everybody shouting, c The French ! Ours ! 
Quick ! ' Indeed, it was the French soldiers who 
drove away the Prussians. Unfortunately they 
stopped at Cernay, and for a long time now they 
have bombarded us and our Cathedral. We also 
heard of the death of my papa, which caused us 
the greatest sorrow. Then grandmother said that 
we had better go away; that it was no longer pru- 
dent to remain. Then mamma took me to regis- 
ter. Then we went to Chalons, and then to Paris 
to the sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, who received 

270 



THE LITTLE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 

us very kindly. Then we went to Nemours, where 
we were also received kindly, and were well 
dressed and well cared for. The first few days 
I was very sad in thinking of Rheims with its 
beautiful sunshine and its beautiful seasons, and 
of my games with my little friends, and of 
mamma, who loved me so much that she always 
gave me as much pleasure as she could. But now 
I am used to seeing these good sisters replacing 
my mother, and I am very grateful to them for 
devoting themselves to the care of us. I should 
also be very grateful to the Society which saved 
me from the bombardment of Rheims. 

" Such is my life during this accursed war." 
Another twelve-year-old, Genevieve Barbier, 
writes uniquely, as follows : 

" I have the honor to tell you the story of my 
life since the day when war was declared by 
France. The declaration came the first of August ; 
then came the general mobilization. On that day 
we were still in Rheims. The next evening, in 
bad weather, the regiments went away, infantry 
and cavalry, to prevent the invader from advanc- 
ing upon our sacred soil ! All the nervous people 
were trembling! The next Sunday papa got 
orders to rejoin his regiment in the Aisne. The 
days succeeded each other; week followed week 
without any orders, without any news ! We were 
astounded to see Rheims, that city once so lively 
with the noise of motors and carriages, now so 
quiet — shall I say dull ? 

271 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

" The afternoon of September the twenty-sec- 
ond, I and my little sisters were dressing our dolls 
when we heard a great ringing. At the sound 
men, women, and children ran out and waited for 
the news. All the mobilized men were to go that 
evening, by order of the mayor, to the Colbert 
barracks. That same night papa came back, hav- 
ing accomplished the mission upon which he had 
been sent. All the men of Rheims who could 
were ordered to join the infantry to fight against 
the accursed barbarians. Papa, though he wished 
to, could not join, being a cavalryman. On the 
twenty-fifth of September several people told us 
that the Germans were retreating through Eper- 
nay, a small city some distance from Rheims. 
What joy filled every heart! But, immediately 
after, we were told that two Prussian officers and 
their men had entered Rheims. The news pre- 
viously announced was insignificant compared 
with this, but in spite of our mortification we had 
to accept it. Next morning at daybreak we saw 
bands of Prussians coming out of the various 
barracks. Their officers ordered a bombardment. 
The sound of the guns was an unknown noise to 
our citizens, frightening them. After the bom- 
bardment those barbarians said they had not 
meant it ! For eight days they besieged the city. 
On the ninth the French soldiers made their tri- 
umphant entry into Rheims. The Germans could 
not find any free route by which to escape except 
through the woods. After their departure came a 

272 



THE LITTLE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 

second and continuous bombardment. Our quar- 
ter, that of the Faubourg Ceres, was very much 
exposed. We resolved to take refuge with some 
close friends in the quarter opposite. We stayed 
there for a good month. Then the bombardment 
attacked this quarter. Where were we to go? 
Where should we seek our way? The people we 
were with decided to leave Rheims and to put us 
with our aunt in Paris. Papa had been recalled; 
mamma was not able to travel with the four of 
us. It was decided to send us to Paris. We could 
either go on the train by way of Dormans to 
Paris, or we could walk as far as Epernay. We 
went by train, and it took six times as long as 
it does in times of peace. My uncle, who was 
sick, wept with joy to see us; so did my aunt. 
They had received no news of us since the bom- 
bardment, as it was impossible to write. We 
stayed with them more than a year. But the war 
lasted, and mamma was not able to take care of 
us because the cost of living had gone beyond all 
price. In spite of the sorrow of separation she 
had to give us to the sisters as refugee children. 
We have now no privations, and our life is very 
happy while we wait for the final victory, after 
which we shall again see our dear parents." 
Genevieve's nine-year-old sister Odette writes : 
" During the war I saw the Germans who came 
from the side near our quarter of the city. But 
they have done a great deal of damage. Every- 
thing is dear. Nearly everybody went away from 

273 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

Rheims. There are many wounded on the battle- 
fields. It is necessary to pray for the Germans 
to go away from Rheims, and that I shall some- 
time find my dear parents who are so good to me. 
I pray for them and for the soldiers who died on 
the field of battle. We went to the Pommery 
cellars, sleeping on straw, and the Germans came 
nearer and nearer, and we were afraid that we 
should have to leave the cellars. During the night 
I could not sleep because I was afraid of the 
bombs that were always falling. The next day 
we got ready our luggage to go away as quickly 
as possible, but the bombs and machine-guns 
forced us back into the cellar. So we decided to 
go to Paris with our aunt, and since that time we 
have been always in Paris." 

Helene Hureau, aged thirteen, has evidently 
been healed by time and by nature of any shock 
the war brought her. 

" When hostilities began," she writes, " we 
lived in the smiling, gracious town of Vitry. The 
night of the first of August a great noise was heard 
in the town; it was the soldiers passing through 
and singing very loudly, for they were all glad to 
be fighting for their country. They were very 
warm, for they had come on foot from the bar- 
racks at Melun. All day long we were making 
preparations for them. It began to be hard to get 
food, especially food imported from the colonies, 
for the Germans with their submarines barred 
the route across the Mediterranean. It was the 

274 



THE LITTLE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 

third of August that we received a letter, or 
rather an order, announcing that papa must go 
away at once. This abrupt separation had the 
effect on me of a thunderbolt. Mamma cried, but 
papa, far from being cast down, went about his 
preparations. At luncheon time the table seemed 
so empty and everything was so sad. 

" We went to Paris to the sisters of St. Vincent 
de Paul, and remained there two months. Then 
we went with the sisters to the little village of 
Nazelle, where we found a great deal of happi- 
ness. What I love in this village are the slopes and 
valleys and silent woods, and the big fountain to 
which every evening come the horses and cows 
and sheep. The horses come from their work and 
the cows and sheep from their pasturage. The 
walks were delightful, and I often sat down under 
the shadow of a big oak and listened to the birds 
singing, or, again, I looked at the beautiful nature 
about me, thinking that whatever the Divine Cre- 
ator had made was well made; or sometimes I 
ran after the butterflies with their golden wings 
touched with little black points; or again, in the 
time of harvest we ran among the wheat to look 
for wild poppies and corn-flowers, and we made 
wreaths of red, white, and blue. We stayed here 
thirteen months, always happy, and then it was 
necessary to begin another life, no less advanta- 
geous, in Nemours, where I actually am now as I 
write these memoirs, and where the sisters take 
good care of us and love us." 

275 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

It is the children and the soldiers that bring 
home to us most the fact that every man, woman, 
and child represents a drama, that homes and vil- 
lages and forests have vanished like those cities 
of old that crumbled under the deep black seas 
about Land's End. In the place of happiness is 
a magnificent courage that will rebuild France. 
And if this present generation of France may 
never know joy again, only cheerfulness and 
bravery, it will be otherwise with the coming 
generation. 

I wish that every child in France could be given 
the food, comfort, and happiness that is the 
heritage of little four-year-old Solange Perrin. 
When I saw him I could have built a shrine to 
him, covering it with spring flowers, letting loose 
upon it song birds, and flooding it with sunshine, 
for Solange has in himself the spirit of young 
France, — gay, charming, unafraid and happy in 
the present. As I entered his schoolroom he was 
singing most zestfully, " I love good tobacco ! " 
He swung his limber body about and wagged his 
head, his mouth wide open, his eyes shining. He 
wore a blue pinafore, a tiny white cape, and a blue 
cap on the side of his head. His teacher set it 
straight two or three times, but it was clear that 
Solange's cap would, throughout his life, slip natu- 
rally to one side. When he marched he exag- 
gerated all the motions; when he danced he threw 
in extra steps; when the children sang the Mar- 
seillaise it was Solange only who stamped his feet 

276 



THE LITTLE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 

at" Marchons ! " — adorable, happy little French 
baby ! 

" My papa is not dead," Solange boasted 
proudly; " Armand's papa is dead but mine is 
only wounded." 

" Where did you live before you came here, 
Solange? " I asked. 

" Always here," he said. 

Fortunate Solange to have forgotten that his 
mother carried him as she trudged weary miles 
from the Ardennes region. Happy little Solange 
who plays in the old garden of the priests in Saint- 
Barbe-des-Champs, unaware that he is a refugee, 
sure that each day is the only day, — but some- 
times his mother looks through the magnificent 
old trees and sees a tiny house battered by German 
shells, and wonders if she will ever again enter 
her own home. May Solange be the forerunner 
of the new nation of French children who will 
have no memory of the horrors of war. 



277 



CHAPTER XV 
In the Front-Line Trenches 

Ah, but madame," they said to me, at the 
Maison de la Presse, " we dare not send you 
into the front-line trenches before Rheims except 
on a day when there is no bombardment. One 
must wait." 

So one waited; at first with confidence, later, 
when one discovered that the bombardments of 
Rheims averaged about two in three days, one 
felt a degree of uncertainty. But when I learned 
that Eleanor had at last gained permission to 
come, my confidence returned. For I knew that 
Eleanor's sunshine luck would hold. 

Permission at last! Madame St. Marie-Perrin 
and I were already at Chalons. We drove down 
to Epernay to spend the night with Madame 

G , a member of a family that for decades 

has been one of the chief wine-growers of the 
champagne country. We made our way along a 
coal-black street to a chateau looming darkly 
against the blue-black sky. Before us was a tall 
iron fence. Madame Perrin found the bell and 
rang. A silence, and then echoing steps in the 
courtyard. The tall gate slowly drew back, and 
an old withered concierge admitted us. We felt 
our way in the darkness. Suddenly a great oblong 

278 



IN THE FRONT-LINE TRENCHES 

of orange light signified to us that the door of the 
chateau had opened. We entered into a marble 
hall, twenty feet high. Statues stood in niches 
between tall windows. At the left was a wide 
marble staircase. Our hostess met us in a white 
and crimson drawing-room. The windows were 
at least fifteen feet high, draped in crimson velvet 
lambrequins. Many mirrors and rare old furni- 
ture were a fit setting to the charming French 
hospitality we received. 

Madame G and her husband, a son home 

on leave, and his wife were our hosts. We talked 

of the hospital for which Madame G is doing 

so much work; of the rumors of a new offensive 
to be launched at Verdun; of madame's little 
grandchildren; of the wine-cellars, of the rue du 
Commerce, where the wine-houses are, of the 
great age of Epernay, which was given to the 
church of Rheims in the time of Clovis. Very 
peaceful and charming and domestic it all was, 
and it was strange to wake in the night and to 
hear, far off, the sound of a bombardment. 

Next morning Madame Perrin and I went to 
the station to meet the Paris train. It was late, 
which distressed us, because we knew that every 
minute we delayed in Epernay shortened by just 
so much our stay in the front-line trenches. In- 
side the station were a very few people who had 
permits to leave Epernay, — women in black, little 
boys in long pinafores and cloaks. There were 
soldiers in blue, standing with their families, wait- 

279 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

ing for the train that was to take them back to 
Verdun. To the enormous pack each carried had 
been added fresh-baked loaves of bread and a 
shining cup or basin, little final gifts from home. 
On a wall of the station was pasted the poster 
which has found so much favor in America, rep- 
resenting a poilu charging towards the enemy, 
shouting, " We '11 get them! " Under the words 
some satirist had written " cold feet! " 

The two military motors arrived which were 
to take us to Rheims, and a small crowd of boys 
surrounded them, saluting, respectfully, the cap- 
tain who was to have us in charge. A dark, radi- 
ant, handsome man he was, gallant, brilliant. He 
had served on many sectors, and had suffered 
greatly at Verdun, where, with a platoon of his 
men, he had been forced to lie for days in a shell- 
hole, wounded, without food or water, and seeing 
his soldiers shot, one after another. Almost at 
the same moment the train from Paris drew in, 
and among a surge of officers out stepped Eleanor, 
and the Spanish journalists who were to make up 
our party. 

Eleanor and I drove together, a non-commis- 
sioned officer sitting beside our corporal-chauffeur. 
When we came to the outskirts of Epernay we saw 
why we needed the officer. A sentry stepped out 
of his tricolor box and stopped us with flashing 
bayonet. Eleanor looked impressed. Wishing 
to impress her further, I said, as one experienced 
in the war zone, 

280 



IN THE FRONT-LINE TRENCHES 

" He 's a territorial. They always put on more 
airs than a regular poilu." 

The officer bent over and whispered the pass- 
word. We listened shamelessly then, and each 
time a sentry stopped us on our way through a 
village, but we were never able to catch the word. 

As we drew near Rheims we came to a stretch 
of road in full sight of the forts the Germans hold. 
On the east the road was screened to a height of 
twenty feet. Some of the screening was of burlap 
in the natural color; the rest of it was of saplings, 
tied together with barbed wire. The saplings 
had faded to a light brown. It made a good 
camouflage. Nevertheless, the chauffeur bowled 
very quickly along that stretch. 

There were the towers of the Cathedral. At 
the distance of a mile the city looked quite un- 
changed. Inside, some streets seemed much as 
they were. Old men and women were seated in 
the doorways; children played on the sidewalks. 
But other streets were closed, and still others were 
long canyons of ruin. 

The shell of the Cathedral rises from a ruined 
square. The Hotel of the Lion d'Or, opposite 
the Cathedral, shows a cream-colored facade, bat- 
tered and pock-marked with shells. We were told 
that the shells fell first in the road, and then their 
fragments bounced up against the walls. The 
archbishop's palace, with its wonderful fifteenth- 
century chimney and its great salon where the 
coronation banquets were held, is now only a heap 

281 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

of featureless wreckage. The little equestrian 
figure of Joan of Arc, before the western entrance 
of the Cathedral, is quite unhurt. The German 
shells seem unable to reach it. Now the figure 
carries in her hand a French flag, and the poilus 
have decorated it around the plinth with various 
tributes. They take it as a good omen that their 
saint is untouched. 

Hundreds and hundreds of times the Germans 
have sent shells in the direction of the Cathedral. 
It has been their scapegoat. Whenever the French 
or British have gained notable success the Ger- 
mans have punished Rheims. It is as if they 
wanted to make true the words Rudolf Herzog 
wrote in the Berlin Lokalanzeiger, January i, 
1915: " The bells sound no more in the double- 
towered dome. Finished is the benediction. We 
have closed with lead, O Rheims, thy house of 
idolatry." But those words can never be true. 
The Cathedral is indeed closed. In other bom- 
barded towns the inhabitants may, if they choose, 
run to their church for sanctuary. Not so there. 
Yet this closing is not forever; the bells are silent, 
but they will speak on the final day of victory. 

Sandbags are used to protect the Cathedral as 
much as possible, but great damage has been 
done. The wonderful figures on the fagade have 
been broken. On the south side high holes have 
been torn in the walls. On the north side several 
gargoyles have been broken, and the little green 
enclosure beneath is full of fragments. Worst 

282 



IN THE FRONT-LINE TRENCHES 

of all, five of the flying buttresses have been seri- 
ously damaged; if three or four more should suffer 
equally, the Cathedral would fall into ruins. It is 
impossible for masons to repair them, for as soon 
as the Germans see them they begin to send over 
shells, accusing the men of being there for obser- 
vation purposes. 

The custodian unlocked for us a little door on 
the right-hand side of the west entrance, and we 
entered this great church, the coronation place of 
kings, once so rich in color, in subdued light, in 
warm incense. When we entered it was into a 
gray, desolate, lonely interior. No one may enter 
now (unless by special permission) except the 
archbishop, for whom a space has been reserved 
behind the high altar, where he may go to pray 
for his people. The vast silent interior is the 
home of doves. Their feathers lie thick on the 
floor, among the fallen stones and plaster. As we 
advanced, the soft creatures flew up in a fast 
cloud to the roof. Our captain looked up 
anxiously. Whenever the Germans see a flock 
of doves rising from the Cathedral it is the cus- 
tom to send over a shell. But, apparently, this 
time they were not looking our way. 

We turned to the famous stained-glass win- 
dow, that great circle of rose and sapphire blue 
that was the wonder of the ages. A large part 
of it is fallen; the rest resisted so bravely, because 
it was set so long ago in the stout lead. The fallen 
glass is travelling over the world as souvenirs, 

283 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

most of it set in the aluminum rings which the 
soldiers make in the trenches. We looked back 
at the high altar. It was covered, what was left 
of it, with a cloth. It looked strangely nonde- 
script, shorn of its crucifix and candles and rich 
decorations. It was hard to believe that Clovis. 
had been baptized here, the great Charlemagne 
crowned before the altar. 

The walls seem curiously bare. Gone are the 
famous tapestries, safely hidden; gone the shrines 
and crucifixes, the stations of the cross, and the 
pictures. The ceiling with its blue ground, the 
silver fleur-de-lis, seems faded and stained; it is 
full of great holes. The light is leaden. There is 
no color, except the burnt blood on the stone 
pavement where the wounded Germans who had 
been carried in for safety were killed by their 
own incendiary bombs. It is said that the French 
do not mean to remove that stain. 

Our captain guided us, speaking with passion 
of the desecrations. We went with him up and 
down the dark aisles, sharing his feelings. Pres- 
ently the custodian began to tell us the history of 
the bombardments. He seemed to know the exact 
date and weight of every shell. Then he began to 
describe in detail his narrow escapes from various 
shells, leaping back realistically to show how he 
dodged them. I am by way of being a writer of 
fiction myself at times, and so I know it when I 
hear it. I went away by myself, and walked up 
and down the sounding nave. 

284 



IN THE FRONT-LINE TRENCHES 

And slowly my sense of gray desolation van- 
ished. I felt as if the Cathedral were sentient. 
It was like some great soul that had suffered so 
much that all the grave joy it had known had 
turned to, majestic endurance, stern resignation. 
Lofty, immobile, the spiritual symbol of the white 
flame of the French soul, — Rheims Cathedral 
is all that. And it cannot pass. Rudolf Herzog 
and the Germans are wrong. They may shatter 
it stone by stone, and still it will live. It is as 
deathless as the spirit of France. 

Eleanor, good, thoughtful friend, came hurry- 
ing up to me. 

"Come along!" she cried. "The custodian 
is giving us bits of the glass. Make haste, or all 
the blue will be gone! " 

It was gone, but, having faith, I asked for more, 
and got it. The custodian gave it, with intent face. 
He stared at me a moment; then he gave me a 
piece of a shell. I took it; he knitted his brow. 
Then he gave me a piece of a gargoyle. I saw 
Eleanor fumbling in her purse, and old tourist 
associations rushed upon me. Of course : custo- 
dian, church, tips. I opened my purse. But I 
think if I had hesitated a little longer maybe the 
custodian would have given me a section of the 
roof. 

We went out at last, and as we walked around 
the back of the Cathedral, on our way to the 
motor and luncheon,. an old man and woman put 
their heads out of a window exactly like two 

_28 5 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

Jacks-in-a-box. They were so obviously eager to 
be spoken to that, in spite of our hunger, we 
questioned them. They had a happy five minutes, 
telling us of how often their house had been hit, 
and how, after sleeping uncomfortably in their 
cellar for days, they would decide to risk sleeping 
upstairs again, and then another shell would 
smash in their roof. Those old people certainly 
enjoyed their adventures. When Rheims is once 
more open to the world, with what immortal gusto 
will they tell their tales ! 

Our gallant captain entertained us at luncheon, 
and then took us to meet General Gouraud, fa- 
mous for his exploits in Africa. He compli- 
mented Eleanor and me upon our bravery in going 
to the trenches. We smiled, modestly, with a 
flickering glance at each other ; right well we knew 
that if he had thought a bombardment imminent 
he would have sent us flying in the motors back 
to Epernay. 

At last we got again into the motors and rode 
northward. Eleanor and I hardly dared breathe 
for fear something would stop us. For, after all, 
Eleanor's luck did not invariably hold at its high- 
est. We bowled along the wide road, overtaking 
motor-lorries and forage wagons. We passed one 
pedestrian, — a woman with a baby in her arms, 
and her gas mask hanging from her left hand. I 
wonder what she 'd have done about the baby's 
little face in case of a gas attack. As we drew 
nearer the trenches the road became lonelier. To 

286 



IN THE FRONT-LINE TRENCHES 

the right it was screened. On our left we passed 
trenches with barbed wire in front of them; they 
had been abandoned for many months. 

At last the cars stopped abruptly by a great 
flat field. In it, far to the left, we saw a rough 
mound, or tall parapet, with a shed or two in front 
of it, and in front of them a number of soldiers. 
There was our objective. To reach it we had 
to go along a road thick with mud. The men were 
practicing throwing hand-grenades, but without 
releasing the pin that makes the mechanism ex- 
plode. They threw them as cricketers do, swing- 
ing back until the right hand almost touched the 
ground, and then letting go in a beautiful long 
curve. A grenade is about as large as a turkey's 
egg, or a big lemon, brownish, with grooves down 
the sides. It feels harmless as one holds it, — 
that is, if one keeps one's imagination in leash. 

There they were, those grenade throwers, 
grave, absorbed, not looking at us, intent on their 
practice of death. To the right of where they 
worked was a little soldier's graveyard, with its 
white crosses, all too new. For all we or they 
knew, a few hours later these soldiers might be 
throwing those same grenades into the German 
trenches. The methods of death seem so common- 
place ; it is the results that are so awful, of physi- 
cal pain and spiritual grief. Poor little human 
race! Capable of contriving all these wonders 
of destruction, but not yet great enough in moral 
force to control them for all the world. 

287 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

We turned from the men and looked at the long 
mound of earth. High up on it, perhaps twenty 
feet above the ground, and facing towards the 
German lines, was a little shed which was an 
observation house. A few feet below it, to the 
right, and connected with it, was a large bell, to 
be rung in case of danger of any sort, — chiefly a 
gas attack. To the right of that again, and lower 
down, was the headquarters of the chief officer. 
Here we entered. It was a tiny place for the 
conduct of the affairs of that little sector. Part of 
it had an iron roof, and under this was the offi- 
cer's bed, a little table on which stood the tele- 
phoning apparatus and two stands made out of 
biscuit boxes, presumably for official papers. The 
rest of the room had an earthen roof, and under 
it were, on one side, a cheap toilet table, a chair, 
a set of shelves, and on the other side a little stove 
and a chair. That chilly little place contrasted 
forcibly with the magnificent chateau which I had 
left only a few hours before, similar to the home 
from which the officer had come. 

This commanding officer had served, like our 
own captain guide, at Verdun, and like him had 
suffered at Verdun. Like him, too, and indeed 
like most of the French soldiers, he had seen serv- 
ice in several other sectors. They told us that 
these particular trenches were held by twenty 
officers and eight hundred men. The first of these 
we saw were in the first aid station, to the left of 
the officers' quarters, and underground. A murky 

288 




a 
w 
Q 
z 

D 
O 

U 

z 

w 
Pi 



IN THE FRONT-LINE TRENCHES 

brown place it was; in front of one wall, half a 
dozen bunks; in front of another an operating 
table; in front of the third a bench and a broken 
chair or two, where slightly wounded men sat, 
while they waited their turn for the surgeon's 
attention. Against the front wall stood gas 
masks and pulmotors. Doubtless a wounded man 
is glad enough to reach this point after a long 
uneven journey on a stretcher, but he must be 
glad to leave it for the ambulance at the entrance 
and the cheerful hospital in Rheims. 

The kitchens were near by, but we were not 
shown them. Heavily escorted now, with cap- 
tains, sergeants, and corporals, we set out for 
our walk through the trenches. At a point oppo- 
site the officers' quarters we descended a row of 
earthen steps into the third-line trenches. The 
trenches ! These open graves of slaughter ! I 
knew what they meant, and yet my practical senses 
told me that I was simply in a chalk-clay ditch, 
about eight feet high and four and a half feet 
wide, over the top of which hung weeds and 
brownish grass. 

Two other trenches ran, for a time, parallel 
with the one along which we walked. Once 
through a boyau, or connecting trench, we saw 
little brown donkeys, wooden receptacles on their 
backs, in which was the soup for the soldiers' 
supper. Underfoot there was a little mud, but it 
was not deep; where it grew deeper trench-mats 
were set. The trenches twisted and turned, 

289 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

slightly, so as to deflect shells. They were excel- 
lently drained by little side ditches. 

After walking for perhaps half an hour we 
entered a narrow communication trench. It was 
marked by a board painted white and red, and 
lettered in black. Every boyau was marked, and, 
indeed, before we had gone very far, we realized 
that these indications were necessary. A man 
would have to live some time in a trench system 
before he became thoroughly familiar with the 
maze of intersections. When a soldier moves 
from one sector to another it is just the same as 
if he went to a new city. 

The boyau twisted and turned, and we pro- 
ceeded with some difficulty. How hard it must 
be for stretcher-bearers and wounded men, mak- 
ing their way along that narrow groove ! It was 
a relief to get into the second-line trenches. They 
were rather more firmly supported than the third- 
line trenches, being occasionally lined with small 
boughs in a sort of wattle work. Now we began 
to pass soldiers carrying square logs and boards 
for trench repair work. Their faces were un- 
shaven, their clothes muddy. They leaned back 
against the walls to let us pass, and looked at us 
smilingly. 

Perhaps if Eleanor and I had been men corre- 
spondents or staff officers or civilians with a pla- 
tonic connection with the war, they might not 
have smiled. But we were women, and a woman 
in the trenches is as rare as a century plant or a 

290 



IN THE FRONT-LINE TRENCHES 

dodo. We spoke to them, and they responded 
eagerly, telling us their names and where they 
lived, and that they remained in the trenches fif- 
teen days on end, getting then six days off in billets 
near by. When I asked one of them if he had been 
wounded, he replied, 

" Not yet." 

Many and many a time I have heard the French 
soldiers make that reply. There is a quiet fatal- 
ism in the words. Death will probably come, they 
think; at the best, wounds! 

When we reached at last the front-line trenches 
we came upon increasing signs of the business of 
war. Here and there was an observation post, 
always named. The Post of the Cock was the 
one I found most attractive, — a black cock 
painted on a red ground. There were several 
first aid posts, with the Red Cross men standing 
at the entrances. There were the square holes 
that led to the underground sleeping places some 
forty steps down. Dank and dark and uncom- 
fortable they were, for all that they are better 
than almost any others on the French line. The 
men sleep in their clothes, lying wrapped up in 
blankets on benches or on the ground. 

One great underground place we entered, a nar- 
row room with another running at right angles 
to it. Here hundreds of men could congregate 
in case of a fierce bombardment, or could be 
massed in preparation for an attack on the Ger- 
man lines. This high cave is also the seat of other 

291 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

military uses which I am not at liberty to state. 
Near by, after we had climbed by another en- 
trance into the trench, we saw machine-gun em- 
placements, with cunning camouflage screens. 

The parapet of the front-line trench was firmly 
built. Below it was the firing step, a wide plank, 
elevated some two feet. Here and there in the 
parapet were holes through which a man, kneeling 
on the firing-step, could fire a rifle. To stand on 
the firing-step would bring the head and shoulders 
above the parapet. On this quiet sector it was 
considered safe for the sentries to stand to obser- 
vation. Now the sector is no longer quiet. 

We reached a point finally when we were 
allowed to crouch on the firing-step and peer over 
the parapet. Vividly, after the chalk and mud of 
the trenches, there swung before my eyes a picture 
in green and brown and black. Directly in front 
of us, extending forward perhaps forty feet, were 
entanglements of barbed wire to a height of three 
feet. They were fastened to rusty sharp-pointed 
iron stakes. Secret lanes were arranged among 
them, which a clip or two of a pair of shears 
would reveal to the French soldiers, in case of 
attack. Here and there, just in front of the 
barbed wire, well screened, sat a man in blue at 
a listening post. A bell hung on the wire at hand, 
so that he could signal in case the Germans were 
coming to attack, or sending over gas. 

In front of the sentries lay No-Man's Land, 
lumpy and brown in places, but in other places 

292 



IN THE FRONT-LINE TRENCHES 

healed with nature's green. And beyond, a very- 
few hundred yards from us, lay the German 
trenches. We were told that they were a bit 
higher than the French, but they seemed rather 
lower. There they were, just three lines of earth. 
The heaped-up parapet of the first line looked 
very black; the two lines beyond were lighter in 
color. About a half a mile behind these trenches 
lay the little white village of Cernay. 

" You see those little figures over there, walk- 
ing? " said the stout sergeant whom I had chosen 
for my special guide. " Those are our own 
people, those are the French civilian prisoners." 

It was easy to guess with what longing those 
captured French must look over the green hollow 
of No-Man's Land to unoccupied France, from 
which their deliverance shall come. Were there 
some there who were waiting their chance to step 
across to freedom? Were there others who were 
growing used to the German rule, gentle enough 
in those parts? 

" Sometimes," the sergeant said, " the French- 
women come down very, very close to the German 
lines. We see them out there, gathering herbs for 
their rabbits. We do not shoot at those times, 
I can tell you. Me, I have often had my supper 
in the old days with two of those women over 
there." 

A curious feeling of unreality it gave, to look 
over at those three heaps of earth upon which 
the sun was shining. If not friendly, at least they 

293 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

seemed harmless. I could hear the rattling move- 
ment of the German donkeys carrying down sup- 
per to our enemies. I even fancied I heard a gut- 
tural voice. I had a sudden sense of the grotesque 
absurdity of war. Wicked but absurd, too, to kill 
one another from behind heaps of earth. 

" I suppose I 've killed a good many Germans," 
the sergeant said, reflectively; " but I never saw 
one of them. I never could follow my shots. 
I 've seen Germans other men have killed, — 
buried them; but I 've never seen a live German." 

We looked back over the green peace of No- 
Man's Land. No, this war could not be real. 
Then suddenly the sergeant uttered an exclama- 
tion and glanced up. Over our heads, towards 
the German lines, were flying two French aero- 
planes. Under the sunlight, they looked like sil- 
ver. They reached the German lines and soared 
above them. Immediately the German guns sent 
up shell after shell. They made a deep, barking 
sound, followed by a curious aftermath of 
whistling. A shell hurtled over our trench. The 
officers hastily shepherded us to a place of safety. 
But my sergeant let me look for a moment through 
the rifle holes. 

Shell after shell drove up at the aeroplanes, and 
in the air dark fungus-like growths of cloud ap- 
peared, — unnatural bulbous shapes against the 
blue. The air was so still that they kept their 
fatness, not breaking at the edges, just gradually 
thinning. More shells, more black blobs, and 

294 



IN THE FRONT-LINE TRENCHES 

above and below, and among them, the aeroplanes 
sailed, impervious, moving with a sort of superior, 
even insolent serenity. Then from both sides 
came the plap-plap-plap of machine-gun fire, a 
continuous, hard, strong, brief, snapping sound. 
Followed the sound of rifle firing. The air was 
full of deep booming and baying, of shrill, snarl- 
ing whistling, of the clap and slap of bullets. 

Not real; more like the feeling produced by 
moving pictures, — melodramatic, nothing more. 
Not real, even when we looked at the fixed faces 
of the soldiers. I understood, then, what sol- 
diers mean when they say that they cannot feel 
that they are really fighting, except when they 
are under bombardment, or making an attack. 
The old conception of war as a face-to-face and 
hand-to-hand struggle dies hard in us. I have 
met other soldiers like my sergeant guide, men 
who have been in the trenches for years, who have 
seen their friends killed, have been wounded 
themselves, and have never seen a German. No, 
this had the effect of a play; it was not significant 
of death. 

Then I thought of the first aid station, of 
women in black, and I knew what it is that makes 
war real: women shuddering in fear at the sight 
of a telegram; mothers struggling alone under 
the burden of being bread winner, as well as sole 
guardian of their children; little ones asking, 
" When will papa come? "; girls sobbing at twi- 
light in lonely paths where once they walked with 

295 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

their lovers; men and women parting in the rail- 
way stations; wounded men, white against their 
bloody bandages, their feet and hands swaying 
helpless with the movement of the stretcher 
bearers. 

It was dark when we left the third-line trenches, 
stumbled over the muddy road, and got into our 
motors. Eleanor and I were silent as we drove 
over the quiet pitch-black road, past the broken 
line of Rheims, where the two towers were lost 
in the dark sky, and got at last into the road 
leading to Epernay. We were safe now from 
shells, but neither of us was thinking of safety. 
We were making silent prayers of thankfulness 
for all men who could still be at home, for all 
women and children, the world over, who were 
still safe from the heaviest loss. 



296 



CHAPTER XVI 

The Grande Route to Verdun 

FOR a long time it had called me, that Grande 
Route to Verdun. For Verdun stands up in 
the history of this time like a mighty warrior rock 
against which opposing waves have dashed in 
vain, — " they shall not pass." The Marne 
stands high in history too, but Verdun has had a 
wider grasp on the national life because of the vast 
proportions of the struggle it represents. To it, 
along the Grande Route, go men from the Midi, 
from Tours and Avignon and Brittany, from 
Tunis and Algiers and Morocco, The Children 
of France, — from all her far-flung provinces they 
march up along the Grande Route to that strong 
rock, Verdun, — and some of them march back. 

Just a long wide road, admirably kept in spite 
of the rough traffic and fierce shelling it has suf- 
fered; a wide road in a rolling lovely countryside; 
it is bordered sometimes by poplars, occasionally 
by a row of cedars, sometimes by a knot of houses ; 
for long stretches it is bare. A road no better 
than many others but significant as no road in 
France ever was before. 

It fascinated me, this Grande Route, because it 
lay like some mighty primitive savage way along 
which the Druids of old built upright pillars lead- 

297 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

ing to sacrificial altars. For Verdun is the sacri- 
ficial altar where France offers up her sons. 
Whenever I could I went upon this Grande Route, 
and from going there, and from meeting men who 
felt its meaning, I gained whatever understanding 
I have of the French common soldier. Long be- 
fore I saw it I met men whom it had led to the 
most staggering experience of their lives, and 
whose talk of it fired my imagination. There was 
the little poilu I saw in a canteen cavorting be- 
fore his companions, a great German helmet on 
his head, coming so far down that one could see 
only his beautifully formed mouth and perky little 
moustache. 

"Ah ha, madame," he said proudly; "I paid 
for that helmet. I want France to have a glori- 
ous victory and I want to give my blood for it, 
and I did, at Verdun." 

There was the soldier to whom I gave a bunch 
of violets at Chalons, and the tears rolled down 
his face as he thanked me and said he had not 
seen any violets since he had gone to Verdun with 
a few he had picked from his own fence corner 
and had pushed into the envelope with his little 
girl's picture. There was the young officer who 
had died in an ambulance upon the Grande Route. 
I saw him lying in state in the chapel of his father's 
chateau with candles at his head and feet, his coat 
and sword across the coffin. There was Jeanne, 
— " just Jeanne," so she spoke of herself. She, 
too, felt the drama of the Grande Route. She 

298 



GRANDE ROUTE TO VERDUN 

lives near it, close .enough to hear the sound of 
cannonading from Verdun, close enough to be in 
danger of shells from St. Mihiel. She keeps a 
little tobacco shop in a village where soldiers are 
billeted, and she supports her little boy Jean, the 
four little girls of her widowed brother who was 
killed in the war, and her other brother, a reforme 
soldier who gets no pension because he was not 
wounded, merely crippled into uselessness with 
rheumatism. 

The day she talked to me we were standing 
in the doorway of her shop, watching soldiers 
marching by; presently they would strike into 
the Grande Route. In a chair outside the shop 
sat her brother, wrapped in a quilt, his right 
arm free so that he might salute the march- 
ing officers. Jeanne's face was full of a quiet 
despair. 

" I cannot bear to see them march by," she said. 
" When the war came my husband and my two 
elder sons marched away from me along this 
road. In the winter of 191 6 they were at Ver- 
dun, all three. My husband was killed, my two 
boys taken prisoner. I hear nothing of them. 
The month I had that bad news my twin boys 
were old enough to be mobilized; they are at Ver- 
dun now. You will know why I work, work, work 
at the shop, in the field, carrying the vegetables to 
market, washing the clothes of the soldiers. But 
however hard I work, I am never too tired or too 
busy to go every day to the chapel to pray that 

299 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

my four may come back to me safe, — or just 
wounded. 

I spoke of the children she had adopted. 

" Strong, I 'm strong," Jeanne said proudly, 
" and so I can take care of all these. The four 
children are to match my four boys; the soldier, 
my brother, is because I think of my husband. 
You see, madame, a woman whom France needs 
is proud ; she will work till she drops, — and then 
get up and do it all over. Time enough for rest 
when victory comes." 

The men in blue kept marching by. The boy, 
Jean, was standing beside the road, shouting 
rudely at them. Jeanne and his uncle called him, 
but he merely grimaced at them. An officer 
stepped a pace to the right and gave him a smart 
blow on the side of the head. The uncle saluted 
with a kind of grim satisfaction; he must often 
have wanted to punish young Jean. 

"There it is," said Jeanne; "it is more than 
our men that have gone. The authority, the 
law that guides the family is gone. That child 
Jean, he feels, with his father dead and his 
brothers away and me so hard at work, that he is 
free from all need of obedience. No family 
in France can go on as a family till France is 
victorious." 

There was Etienne from the Grande Route, 
— tall, thin Etienne whom I met at Bar-le-Duc, 
as he was waiting for his train to Paris; Etienne 
with a glorified face, from which all weariness 

300 




■/■■A-'- 



GRANDE ROUTE TO VERDUN 

and strain had slipped away; Etienne who was 
singing at the top of his voice, 

" ' Bon voyage, cher Dumollet, 

A Saint Malo debarquez sans naufrage, 
Bon voyage, cher Dumollet, 
Et revenez si le pays vous plait. 
Si vous venez voir le capitale 
Mefiez vous des voleurs des amies, 
Des billets doux, des coups de la cabale, 
Des pistolets et des torticolis.' " 

Going on leave is always elevating to the spirits 
of the soldier, but Etienne's enthusiasm amounted 
to intoxication. Yet I did not wonder when he 
explained. 

" See, madame," he said, " I lived in the 
north, near Tourcoing. I was married in the 
spring of 19 14. Good! she was a fine girl, my 
wife. Very well ; we are happy until July. Then, 
my faith, nothing I can do pleases her and so, natu- 
rally, nothing that she can do pleases me. In the 
last week of July I rose one morning and she was 
not making the breakfast; she had gone. She 
left a little letter which said, * Me, I am gone to 
stay with my aunt until you are in a better temper/ 
But naturally it did not improve my temper, that ! 
I was angry; I kept to myself. The next thing 
came the mobilization. I had time only to pack, 
to get together two days' rations, to lock up my 
little house and to send a letter to my wife. It 
was the letter a loving husband should write. I 
asked her to come home and wait for my return. 

" Then I was sent to the Argonne. Next I 
301 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

heard that the Germans had poured in upon north- 
ern France, upon Tourcoing. That was all; it 
was as if a curtain had fallen. We had quar- 
relled; I had said that her cooking would make 
monkey meat of a fat chicken; she had said I was 
a ' vietox loppe? Ah, well, I thought of it only 
to wish we had parted as other soldiers and their 
wives had. It was a bad memory in the trenches. 
" I heard nothing, nothing. My first permis- 
sion I spent in Paris trying to get the ear of 
people who might be able to find my wife for me. 
But, madame, this is my second permission. She 
is found; she was repatriated but two weeks since. 
She is safe in Paris and they are letting me go 
to her. With her is my little son. Think, mad- 
ame, my little son, almost two years old, of whose 
existence I did not guess, but who knows my pic- 
ture, calls it * papa.' Ah, ha, 

" ' Bon voyage, cher Dumollet.' ' : 

If only all the men that march upon that route 
could be as happy as Etienne ! Or if they could be 
as confident as little Christophe who had known a 
miracle ! One Sunday, when I was at the Gare du 
Nord with a group of soldiers who were just 
about to depart for the front, I particularly noticed 
a little sprightly monkey-like creature, gyrating 
and grimacing, almost unnaturally gay. In his 
joyous motions his tunic slipped back, and I saw 
that he had a little sacred medal pinned over his 
heart. 

302 



GRANDE ROUTE TO VERDUN 

" It is there because of my saint, madame," he 
told me; " because of Joan of Arc. One night in 
the trenches she came to me. She bent over the 
parapet and spoke to me. She told me that I 
would not die, if I wore her image over my heart." 

Christophe told me, more vaguely, that he had 
seen the angel of Mons. But here he was vague, 
not at all like the Highlander who had related to 
me his mystic experience after Mons. Him I met 
one evening towards twilight in Essex, when a 
Zeppelin was expected. I had been making a 
short cut across fields to the railway station, in 
order to be safe in London when the bombs were 
dropping, and I had lost my way. He came 
silently out of a knot of trees, a light-stepping, 
grave man, with dark, mournful eyes. It seemed 
natural, after I had asked him my way, to fall into 
talk with him. We walked on together. It was 
very still; the brown winter fields looked asleep; 
in the sky were beautiful dark-gray cloud forma- 
tions. I said to him that they looked like a host 
of shadowy marching men. 

" Aye," he agreed; "but shadowy men dinna 
march." 

Then it occurred to me to ask him, as I had 
asked so many soldiers, what he thought of the 
Miracle of Mons. 

" I was there," he said; " I saw it." 

In my mind rose a hinterland of vague memo- 
ries — tales of Highland second-sight, of mysteri- 
ous visions, of haunting seanachas, of ancient 

303 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

Gaelic mysticism. They were in accord with this 
quiet evening and with this grave, still man whose 
deep eyes spoke worlds of experience which no 
woman could ever know. In that moment nothing 
he could have said to me would have seemed 
unreal. 

Without preface he began to tell me what he 
had felt and seen. 

" We were three brothers," he said, " and be- 
fore the battle of Mons, in the middle of the night, 
my brother Dougal touched me on the shoulder 
and woke me. ' I '11 no be going back wi' ye, 
Jock,' he said. ' Ye '11 tak' this letter to my 
mother.' He had heard his call, and I didna call 
it foolishness. 

" After the sergeant ordered us to stand to, be- 
fore the attack, my brother Alexander came past 
me, with an order from the first lieutenant to the 
sergeant, and he stopped to shake hands wi' me, 
and he said, ' Good-by t' ye, lad.' By that I knew 
that Alexander had learned he wouldna march 
back wi' me. 

"Ye '11 have heard of the battle? Those at 
home knew more of it than we did for many a day. 
A man 's a madman in a battle; he sees nothing 
but the Germans in front of him. You might have 
thought I would be wondering when and how my 
brothers would die. I wasna even thinking of my- 
sel' as something that could die. 

" I wasna thinking at all. It was all shouting 
and red horror, and keeping at it. I didna rightly 

304 



GRANDE ROUTE TO VERDUN 

come to mysel' till we were in retreat. It was 
when we were marching with the Germans at our 
back, instead of before us, that I began to feel like 
a man again, and it was shame I felt, and grief 
and wonder. Then it was that the corporal who 
walked beside me spoke to me, and he said that 
he had seen Dougal die, and that he died without 
pain, shot through the head. When we walked on 
farther, he told me that Alexander was dead, too, 
but that his death was less merciful. This cor- 
poral was in the same platoon with my brothers, 
and he knew. 

" It was in the twilight when I came to full 
grief for my brothers. We were marching, droop- 
ing like tired beasts. Once some. German snipers 
shot at us, and killed the man just behind me. I 
fell to thinking what if that had been me and how 
would my mother fare, wi' all three of her sons 
gone ? I began to wish for my own life then, for 
my mother's sake. 

"' That twilight was full of terrors. Germans 
everywhere, and if not Germans, then fear and 
wonder and distress. I could see men falling 
down — struck, who knew how ? No one dared 
stop to see if it were a bullet, or just sleep that 
overcame them. And it seemed to me as if the 
Germans were sweeping up on us like a tide. I 
heard myself crying on my elder brother Dougal, 
and crying on my mother, too. 

" Then all suddenly I found myself walking 
backward, and looking — looking into the dark. 

305 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

Against the sky behind I felt there was something. 
I looked — and then the blackness shaped itsel' 
into dim figures. Men have said that it was the 
angels helping us that night against the Germans. 
It may have been, but that is not what I saw. 
Those who helped us appeared to my eyes like 
the men that had fallen on our side in the battle of 
Mons. They had fallen because we were out- 
numbered and unprepared. They had died too 
soon, before all their work for their country was 
done. And now they had risen in the dark to hold 
back the Germans. That they fought with 
weapons I do not believe, but that they were help- 
ing us, I know. 

'"Dougall'Icried. ' Aleck!' 

" And though I couldna see them, I knew my 
brothers were there, guarding me. They couldna 
go back to my mother again, but they would pro- 
tect me, for her sake. I couldna hear my brothers 
speak; I didna hear any sound from those who 
helped us. 

' Do you see? ' I said to the corporal. 

" He saw nothing, but he listened; and he said 
he could hear the Germans shouting. I heard 
them, too; cries of surprise, and fear. The cor- 
poral thought they were the shouts of victors, but 
I knew who the victors were. I was filled wi' a 
great peace, like the sense of rest after pain. It is 
not defeat when men come back from the dead to 
help." 

But I never thought of the Miracle of Mons 
306 



GRANDE ROUTE TO VERDUN 

when I was near the Grande Route or near Ver- 
dun. Story after story I heard from men who 
knew the trenches of Verdun as each of us knows 
our own home. And this and that tour brought 
me nearer the Grande Route until at last I saw 
the men in blue upon it. To drive along it from 
end to end was not given me ; something yet waits 
me there, but I have seen enough of it to feel 
something of its meaning. 

I remember the late afternoon that we drove 
across the road and came suddenly on a camp of 
soldiers. Their fires, burning low, made a deep 
pink glow in the brown gloom. The men, their 
blue darkened in the shadows, sat about the glow, 
their packs beside them, bread and wine in their 
hands. Behind them a few horses, their heads 
drooping, were tethered against a bulwark of 
wagons. 

I remember an early morning when a heavy mist 
swathed the road we were on so that the car 
seemed swimming through a gray-blue sea. We 
were going at right angles to another road, and 
suddenly, veiled in the gray-blue swathing cloud, 
I saw half a division going up to the Grande 
Route : wagons and horses, lorries and kitchens 
and men in blue who looked like wraiths. They 
seemed to drift, and presently they were not 
wraiths; the mist lightened, and they were those 
young, young soldiers that went up to make the 
latest heavy advance at Verdun. History is made 
on the Grande Route, and drama; history for 

307 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

people who will read it impersonally, and drama 
for those whose hearts are sympathetic and whose 
imagination is keen. 

Of those I met on or near the Grande Route, 
three soldiers stand out for me as especially indi- 
vidual characters : Antoine, Gaspard, and Gaston. 
I shall not call them " typical soldiers " or " typi- 
cal soldiers of France," for I am sure I don't 
know what the typical soldier is. I have read 
descriptions of him as joking, laughing, com- 
plaining over little things, making light of seri- 
ous difficulties, enthusiastic over the victories 
the Allies gain, and eager, in the hospitals, to get 
cured quickly of wounds so as to return to fight. 
All I can say is that of the hundreds I have talked 
to in England and France, — they all had a way 
of turning into individuals and not conforming to 
such a type at all. For all that they are obedient, 
they are not machines; they are strongly flavored 
personalities, capable, after you know them, of 
surprising you. 

To give a trivial instance : there was Arsene, 
fiercest of little soldiers in attack, mildest of men 
in the trenches, where he let anyone impose upon 
him. I saw him on New Year's night, a diffident, 
shrinking little man, self-conscious and self-depre- 
ciatory. A party was being given to soldiers about 
to return to the front. After a grand supper and 
gifts, someone, half as a joke, began to throw 
dolls to the soldiers. They all tried to catch one. 
Time after time Arsene tried; some big comrade 

308 



GRANDE ROUTE TO VERDUN 

would push him aside, and Arsene would give back 
with a deprecatory smile. I secured a doll, and 
burrowing through the parapet of spectators I 
gave it to him. He was radiant ; he told me that 
he meant to send it to his little girl. A few days 
later I had a letter from a filleul, who told me, as 
a joke, that Arsene had not been able at once to 
post his doll to his little girl, had carried it into 
the trenches, and it had then disappeared. He 
had gone Berserker, offered to kill all the men in 
the platoon if the doll were not given back; he 
had to be held by some of his amazed comrades. 
Later someone found it; a rat had eaten half 
its head off. Arsene was now (evidently with 
deadly seriousness) killing every rat he could 
reach. 

I do not feel as if I can generalize with wisdom 
about the French soldier. Perhaps it would have 
been possible, to a degree, about the old army 
which was a caste ; but the new army is the whole 
nation. He does remind me of an Irishman in 
his frankness, wit, sympathy, and sensitiveness to 
beauty. I find him patriotic, uncomplaining, 
stoical. He strikes me as a forced martyr; he is 
willing to die for France, but in his dark moods 
he wants to be killed if the war does not end soon. 
In his lighter moods he believes that it will end 
within a future of six or eight months. They have 
given everything to France, these soldiers : their 
standards of living; their bodies, their souls, their 
minds; men who were once capable of splendid 

309 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

thoughts are now vacant-minded in the trenches; 
their minds are as if suspended till the war ends. 
There is nothing that France asks from them that 
she may not have, but they give because they love 
France and not because they like the grim job 
she has set them to. 

Antoine, Gaspard, and Gaston, then, seemed 
to me not necessarily typical, but good examples 
of flavored personalities. Meeting Antoine was 
the one gay experience I had on the Grande Route. 
I was in a military car of which the " essence " 
had failed. The driver went for more and I got 
out to see what was on the road. I saw Antoine. 
His coloring was like that of an English country 
boy, and his clean-shaven face heightened the re- 
semblance. But there it stopped; Antoine's glanc- 
ing eyes were Gallic, and also his neat mouth. 
His smile was like a " bravo ! " Strictly speaking, 
I did not meet him on the Grande Route but on 
a road leading from it, going back into billets and 
quiet. And at the moment I saw him he was not 
smiling, though it was evident that his face was 
made for merriment. He and another man were 
in charge of a wagon and two mules. As I learned 
later, Antoine's slight physical constitution had 
shut him out of the trenches. He and his com- 
rade were leaning back against the wagon, shak- 
ing their heads, and looking gloomily at the mules. 

I noticed the mules first, for " mules " is a 
word to which, for me, the war has given a new 
connotation. If, in pre-war days, I ever thought 

310 



GRANDE ROUTE TO VERDUN 

of mules, it was with the conventional assumption 
that they were obstinate, and were liable to kick 
at unexpected and adroitly selected moments. But 
so many English soldiers have talked to me about 
them and their endurance that I never hear the 
word " mules " without a surge of affection for 
those quiet, patient, sure-footed animals that will 
go where horses will not, that never, in tight 
places, get a fit of nerves, as horses do, that never 
stumble, and that work till they drop, — like 
soldiers. 

While I gazed at Antoine's mules with admira- 
tion, Antoine's comrade got in an upright position, 
shook a few lumps of mud off his mired blue over- 
coat, and passionately kicked the mules, one after 
the other. I heartily regretted that this was not 
my affair, and, indeed, I did involuntarily take a 
step forward. Then I heard Antoine say, 

" Impossible, Victor. Let them stand. Leave 
it to me." 

He had stopped shaking his head, and his face 
was gay. 

" It will be a long wait," he added, cheerfully, 
"but what of that?" 

Since we were both waiting we fell into talk. 

" Did the mules deserve the kicks your friend 
gave them? " I asked. 

" But look at the back of his coat, madame," 
giggled Antoine. 

I looked; the back of his coat did not seem to 
me very different from the front or from the 

3ii 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

man's face or boots, but evidently Antoine saw 
a difference, for he continued, with bubbling 
laughter, 

"Victor tried to push Melanie — she is the 
mule nearest us; and Melanie pushed back. Ah, 
she is the sly one. She put old Victor in the mud." 

" Melanie ! What a pretty name." 

" It 's the soldier's name for his sweetheart and 
his pipe, and I gave it to Melanie because she is 
the girl for me, that one, for all her tricks. The 
other one, Belle-Amie, is Victor's favorite." 

Perhaps Antoine thought I was inwardly com- 
menting on Victor's way of showing favoritism, 
for he went on, 

" They 're good girls, those mules, but madame 
arrived at a moment when they were neglecting 
their manners. They do not like this road. I 
think it was Melanie who whispered to Belle- 
Amie that it would be amusing not to like the 
road. Very well; I beg and plead; then I push; 
Victor pushes. There they stand. Ah, but look 
at Victor ! " 

Victor was seated on the back of the wagon, 
glowering bitterly. 

" Poor Victor ! We have been on the road so 
long," said Antoine, blithely. " We have had 
nothing to eat since morning, for we expected to 
be in billets before this, eating good hot soup. 
For three hours, now, Belle-Amie and her devil's 
counsellor, my Melanie, have stood, just so. 
Look at them, madame; their faces." 

312 



GRANDE ROUTE TO VERDUN 

Their faces were merely blank; they stared 
fixedly in front of them, seeming not even to move 
their eyelids. No methods applied to them, it 
would seem, would make them look up. They 
were amusing, — but they were a bit awe-inspir- 
ing, too, in their imperturbability. 

" For three hours," said Antoine, laughing, 
" everyone who has passed these daughters of 
evil has beaten them or pushed them, and has 
gone away with a kick or a shroud of mud. Ah, 
well, they deserve a little fling of temper, now 
that we are in a safe place, for in a dangerous 
place, madame, they never fail me. They are 
not afraid of this road. They merely do not like 
it, and they understand that it will not harm me 
if they give way to their mood. But if there were 
something really to be afraid of these girls would 
not even wink. 

" Ah, who knows that better than I? For I 
have taken them over a road with ammunition in 
the wagon when the shells were falling, and I 
assure you they pretended to crop the grass by the 
roadside. It is the truth I speak, madame ! Once, 
when Victor and I and another man were leading 
ten mules, a shell came plop in the middle of 
them. Such a pot-pourri of blood and severed 
limbs ! Naturally, we thought they were all fin- 
ished. After a few minutes Melanie and Belle- 
Amie slowly raised their heads as if to say, ' Is it 
safe to get up? ' 

" A little quiet deviltry now and then, what 
3i3 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

does it signify? It is lost in the memory of the 
way they will carry ammunition straight up to 
a gun that the Germans are feeling for with their 
biggest shells. They only do what they please, 
those two, when they are in a safe place like this." 

" But you '11 have to start them some time," 
I said, looking respectfully at the mules. " Do 
you mean to starve them into obedience? " 

" But no, madame. I should be dry bones 
myself before they gave in. No; after it is 
dark I shall take their heads and turn them so 
that they will think they are going back over the 
Grande Route. Then I shall take them out of 
the harness and turn them round and round till 
they are without sense. Then I put them back 
to the wagon and bourn! we are off! They will 
think they are going back, and before they know 
it they will be warm in billets." 

It was good to hear his ringing laughter in that 
zone of war, and I devoutly hoped that the 
chauffeur would take some time to find our es- 
sence. Antoine rattled on gaily, and presently 
we were talking of the German prisoners who had 
been sent back from Verdun a few days before. 

" Ha! if you could have seen them," said An- 
toine, " so glad, as all the world knows, to be 
taken prisoner. I was bringing up ammunition 
and I did not hear how the battle was going. I 
had my work, madame understands, and it was 
not my business to speculate. Very well; I do not 
then hear this : that we are taking prisoners, and 

3H 



GRANDE ROUTE TO VERDUN 

that we have no men to spare to send back with 
them as escorts; that we face them towards Ver- 
dun, those we do not keep back as stretcher 
bearers; that we give them a push in the back 
and say, ' Go that way ! ' 

" One of these Germans must have got himself 
lost, madame. I am half mad with work; my 
wagon is mired; we cannot get it out of the shell- 
hole without help. I run back for more mules 
and two men. I meet this Boche. Figure him 
to yourself, madame; big, so big as a lamp-post, 
with his jaw dropped and his face full of terror 
and weariness. Me, I should have been sorry for 
him if I had not been so busy. He stumbled 
towards me, his hands raised. 

" l Kamarad,' he said, and then he took off his 
helmet and handed it to me ; * Kamarad ; souvenir,' 
he said, in French to turn the stomach, ' I am 
your prisoner ! ' 

" Madame will see that I do not accuse myself 
when I say I forgot my manners. Perhaps I 
should have remembered our proverb, l Politeness 
as far as the gallows, but hanging, nevertheless.' 
But my affairs were very pressing, and I said to 
him, 

" ' Get out of my way ! Get out of here ! ' 

" He clutched me, saying, ' I am your prisoner.' 

" ' You are not my prisoner,' I said to him, 
keeping his helmet all the same. ' Get out.' 

" That one had assurance. ' You have taken 
my helmet,' he said; ' you will protect me.' 

3i5 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

" That was a pretty thing, madame, to have 
a prisoner take possession in this way of a soldier 
of France ! I was so indignant that I was about 
to do him some damage, when he said, 

" ' I appeal to your French chivalry. I am 
hungry. I am thirsty/ 

" After that what could I do, madame? I took 
him back with me, polite now, but raging. We 
met another wagon and mules and two men. We 
all returned and pulled out my wagon, my prisoner 
helping. Then I gave him a drink of my wine 
and a loaf of bread, and I turned him about, fac- 
ing to the city. 

" ' Monsieur,' I said to him, c go that way, I 
entreat you. Pray pardon my inability to accom- 
pany you. Go that way, and I beg of you do not 
turn aside. It might be that you would meet some 
other Frenchman, busy like myself, and might 
incommode him. There are others, too, who lack 
the time to take prisoners. Go direct, monsieur.' 

" But then, madame, behold my Melanie ! I 
have her out of the harness to put at the head 
of the other mules when we pull out the wagon. 
She has been eyeing that Boche. He does not 
please her. She does not like it when I give him 
my wine and bread. And Melanie, — she does 
not have to be polite; the Boche has not begged 
to be her prisoner. She slips over to him, mad- 
ame, and she pushes him, with her shoulder, off 
the road. That is the way she reads the situa- 
tion, madame ; that is the way she treats an enemy 

316 



GRANDE ROUTE TO VERDUN 

who has surrendered. Nothing brutal, it is under- 
stood; just push him out of the way." 

Joyous little Antoine; what cared I how much 
of his tale was invention! How regretful I was 
when the chauffeur returned with apologies for 
my long waiting. I think I was never sorrier to 
part from anyone in France than from that little 
rosy dark soldier. The memory of him was good 
to have at times when I saw soldiers who had 
almost forgotten how to smile. 

Gaspard was one of these. He was a little 
brown man with a ferocious frown, a sardonic 
mouth, and a bitter heart. He saw me on the 
Grande Route, and later, when we met in billets, 
he recalled the circumstance, and we talked. Gas- 
pard hated not only the Germans and the war, 
but almost everybody except the soldiers. 

" When this war began, madame," he said, " I 
was a child, a trusting child, but now I am grown 
up, me. And what began it? I had gone out to 
war singing. I fought in those first bad weeks on 
the Marne, when we sheltered behind trees, or 
clumps of grass, or had no shelter, when we re- 
treated, hungry, worn out, sick because we were 
losing. Then came the stand; the tide was turn- 
ing. We were reinforced. I went with my com- 
rades to a little village to get some wine. Other 
soldiers had been there to buy but there was 
plenty left. 

" Ah, yes, but what did she do, that bearded 
old mother of Satan that kept the wine-shop. She 

3i7 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

charged me that first day, for wine that was worth 
twelve sous, fifteen. There was no use to go to 
another place. The shopkeepers had combined 
to eat up all our money. Before we went to an- 
other village, before our officers had interfered 
for us, those people were asking two francs for 
wine worth twelve sous. 

" Bah, those civilians ! We soldiers, we give 
our skin for them, and then they cheat us ! They 
grow rich. Men are driving in their automobiles 
who used to walk; women are buying pearls who 
three years ago could not have bought a string 
of glass beads. It is true. In Paris the manufac- 
turers of private automobiles are selling them as 
never before. Every afternoon at half past four 
these people drive down the Champs Elysees. 
In the morning they walk with their lapdogs in 
the rue de Bois. Out of our blood they have made 
their money. And with that money they buy the 
freedom of their sons, put them, the fine em- 
busques, in some safe service. But we — we die 
to make their purses fat ! 

" See, madame, I have given everything to 
France. We had a little place near Douai, my 
wife and I. We worked hard, I assure you. For 
our two little ones, a boy and a girl, we made 
many plans. Then the town-crier read the procla- 
mation of a general mobilization, and I went. I 
had no letters. I heard of the German invasion 
of Douai. For months I did not know whether 
they were alive, my wife and children. Then at 

318 



GRANDE ROUTE TO VERDUN 

last I had a letter. They had fled before the Ger- 
mans. What horrors my wife wrote of; crowds 
pushing along the road, children dying of starva- 
tion and of terror, the dogs running with them, 
and waiting at the cross-roads always to see which 
way the people would go. The neighbors who 
fled after my wife reported to her that my little 
home is pulverized, my ground has become no 
man's land. Do you know what that means? 
That it will be years before I can get good crops 
again or build a home. Never mind, I think; 
they are safe. The Red Cross ladies give them 
clothes. France will take care of my wife and 
children. 

" They go to Troyes, madame, and the civilians 
in Troyes begin to clutch at them. My wife got 
work. She rented a little room at an unheard of 
price; she rented furniture. For a bed they 
charged her ten francs a month rent and every- 
thing else equally dear. To live at all she had to 
take in with her a friend. In three months she 
has paid in rent for her furniture what the things 
would have cost to buy them. Ah, and it is these 
people of Troyes, to keep such as them safe that I 
live in mud and cold, eaten by vermin, my clothes 
stiff as wood. It is for them that the coffee-mill 
(machine-gun) grinds out the bullets that tear 
my flesh to shreds! Civilians, I spit on them." 

I tried to tell Gaspard of the unselfishness of 
certain French civilians that I knew of but the 
tide of his eloquence swept on. 

3i9 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

" Look you, madame, they come into the 
trenches sometimes, these civilians. Joy-riding, 
we call it. They come in order that they may go 
back and say to their friends, ' I was under fire, 
me ! I had powerful influence, and so I was 
allowed to go into the trenches.' Pah ! they come 
smirking over the excitement of seeing how our 
dear little soldiers live ! I wonder we don't tear 
them to pieces ! We soldiers, we want our fight- 
ing to get us somewhere, to get France somewhere, 
not to make bloodsuckers richl Good civilians 
there may be. I speak of those I know. And 
good or bad, it is not for the civilians I am fight- 
ing, but for France, and for my wife and children." 

" But at least," I ventured, " you do not find 
the soldiers like that? Some day the soldiers will 
go back and turn into the kind of civilians you 
like." 

Garpard's grim face melted. 

" Ah, yes, the comrades! One makes a friend, 
madame; one builds up a parapet with him, eats 
with him, shares tobacco, and then a shell kills 
him. One dare not love his comrades, — but 
one does love them. Before this war one forgot 
if this and that friend invited him out to supper, 
or took him to a cafe. But in the trenches one 
does not forget when a friend lends him a pair of 
boots. Ah, yes, one finds good hearts in the 
trenches. Sometimes even one of these rich boys 
who used to dance the tango and powder his ears, 
— he will be a good friend, too. If they are not 

320 



GRANDE ROUTE TO VERDUN 

all killed, our friends, we shall have great old 
days talking these battles over. Yes, and the 
young ones will sit about listening while we slap 
it on thick. But we could not slap it on thicker 
than it is. Ah, yes, those days will pay a little 
for these days." 

Poor Gaspard, I hope that he will live to see 
his dream come true. Like so many soldiers, he 
takes it for granted that he. will not be killed; 
others, doubtless, but not he. Little gentle Gas- 
ton, on the contrary, saw death over every para- 
pet. He was a slim wand of a man whom I met 
once when he was so covered with mud that he 
looked almost as if some sculptor had modelled 
him roughly out of clay and had set him up by 
the side of the road to dry. 

" Mud " is another word for which the war 
has given me a new connotation. One never talks 
long to a soldier from any part of the western 
front without hearing of it. There are terrible 
tales of the scores of men who have been 
smothered in shell holes at Verdun. Even when, 
on the march, a man can avoid shell holes, the 
mud clutches at his feet like fat squeezing hands, 
clogs his ankles, swathes his knees, leaps at his 
thighs, spatters his body and face, weighs him 
down like an infinitely multiplied old-man-of-the- 
sea. It is a combination of two elements with 
all the potency of each at its worst. It seems 
as if Nature, on her own account, were fighting 
against soldiers. With infinite weariness a sol- 

321 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

dier pulls at his right leg; it comes up slowly from 
knee to ankle, to foot. What a relief to feel it 
free! Then, one pace forward he drops it; down 
it goes, sinking, sucked, painfully weighted, com- 
ing to rest at last with a jarring jerk. It seems im- 
possible that he could ever move again — and 
then it is all to do over with the other leg. A man 
may joke when he begins to walk in the mud, 
but before the march ends he could, but for his 
sex, weep like a child. Shells, shrapnel, machine- 
guns, trench morters, bombs, — these may make 
a man dodge and curse, but nothing fills him with 
such dragging despair as the mud. There is bitter 
irony in the fact that just mud can rack the souls 
and bodies of men, make them forget country and 
home and the enemy, turn them into desperately 
lurching things, wanting only to lie down. One 
day a great story will be written about the mud. 
In it lies buried more grandeur and despair than 
has ever been put between the covers of a book. 

Later, when Gaston was scraped and measur- 
ably dry, and fed, I asked him a question I had 
long wanted to put to a soldier. 

" What do you talk about in the trenches, 
Gaston?" 

Gaston pinched his chin reflectively. 

" That depends, madame. Suppose it is cold, 
wet. When I say that I do not mean cold and wet 
as one understood them before the war. But 
I mean a soaking mist with the breath of ice in 
it, cold so. intense that one dare not sit down for 

322 



GRANDE ROUTE TO VERDUN 

fear of freezing. In weather such as that we do 
not think. If we talk at all it is to complain be- 
cause the meal is late in coming, or to prophesy 
that it will be rotten stuff when it comes. We get 
angry for nothing, — because a comrade acciden- 
tally knocks us with his foot, or because we sud- 
denly do not like the shape of his nose. We 
shout terrible things at him, and then, in the 
middle of what we were saying, we stop, as if it 
were not worth while to finish." 

Gaston paused, knitting his brows. 

" I am sorry I asked you, Gaston, if it distresses 
you to remember." 

Gaston laughed shortly. 

" It is not that, madame, it is that when I am 
sitting here, so comfortable, all that to which I 
must go back is an ugly dream. I imagine that 
it was not so bad as I thought it. If perhaps a 
sudden weariness reminds me that life in the 
trenches has made my bones old, has made me no 
longer young Gaston, then I say to myself that 
perhaps soon I shall be sent to a quiet sector." 

" But there are good days, Gaston, when the 
sun shines? " 

" Ah, yes; when the sun shines, when we have 
hot food and wine in our bottles, then, indeed, 
we are content. We are gay, we even sing. It 
is some little song we knew at home. We talk 
of our homes, of our wives, of our girls, of our 
children. We repeat some bright saying of the 
little ones. We tell some story of the village skin- 

323 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

flint that made us angry once, but now we laugh 
at it. We remember little things that used to be 
in the happy past; how, as children, our mothers 
would come to the door and stand looking after us 
as we gambolled down the street to play with the 
other boys. We remember how our wives would 
cook for us our favorite food, keeping the dish 
covered till the last minute with a mysterious 
smile. We remember the last letter we wrote 
home, and think that perhaps it was not cheer- 
ful enough. We talk of the ending of the war, 
believing that it must come soon. We tell 
how we would have fought this and that battle 
to have gained a greater and a quicker victory. 
Ah, yes; on these sunny days we could teach our 
generals. 

" Then the time of our permission seems not 
so far away. We make plans and our plans have 
nothing to do with the war. When I was last on 
my permission I went to the house of the gentle- 
man for whom I worked. My wife is also cook 
there. He is kind; he kissed me on both cheeks 
as if he had been my captain greeting me after a 
victory, and he said, 

1 Gaston, my child, you and Emilie may go 
wherever you like for your week.' 

" But I said to him, ' Pardon, monsieur, I pre- 
fer to take up my work again here, to wait on the 
table as I did. The house has suffered since I left. 
I noticed that a rung of madame's chair had come 
loose; the stair carpet requires, in places, fresh 

324 



GRANDE ROUTE TO VERDUN 

tacking. There is much that I should like to 
occupy myself with at home, monsieur.' 

" So I worked in the house all week and slept 
in a bed and forgot that I was a soldier. I did 
not think I should be alive long enough to sleep 
again in a bed. When I went back to the trenches 
I had good memories." 

Gentle Gaston, fierce Gaspard, gay Antoine, 
your feet have marched away again up that 
Grande Route to Verdun. The crisp fall of 
marching feet! Once it meant for me only that 
a number of men were walking in unison. But 
now it means courage so eternal that it turns flag- 
ging flesh to steel; an endurance so keen that it 
takes no account of pain, a passion for France so 
flaming that it swings men on to face any fate. So 
many of those feet that march for France have 
gone through the last outposts that lie beyond the 
trenches of any earthly enemy. But they will go 
on marching so long as the world holds precious 
the qualities by which we may hope to recapture 
civilization. 



325 



CHAPTER XVII 

Barnstorming for the Poilus 

IT was very early in the morning on a platform 
of that station in Paris from which the poilus 
depart for the front. 

I was seeking for a group of actors and ac- 
tresses from the French army theatre, — now in 
its second year. Thanks to the courtesy of M. 
Alphonse Seche, the secretary of the theatre, I 
was to spend with them almost a week. The com- 
pany was going up to some little villages back 
of Verdun and within easy shell reach of St. 
Mihiel, to give entertainment to various com- 
panies of soldiers, just back from the terrible last 
days at Verdun. Finding my companions would 
be simple, for anyone on the platform not a sol- 
dier or employee would be an " artist." There 
they were, in a group, four women and three men, 
standing beside a first-class carriage, under the 
interested gaze of poilus who should have been 
seeking their own third-class carriages. 

They were worth gazing at, these famous 
people who were giving their distinguished serv- 
ices free, day after day, to bring a few soothing 
hours of forgetfulness to the men who are giving 
their all to France. As I walked up the platform, 
what I noticed first, as any woman will under- 

326 



BARNSTORMING FOR POILUS 

stand, was a magnificent long sable coat and two 
huge diamond rings. They were on the tall figure 
and small, strong hand of Mile. Marcelle Praince, 
of the Varietes, whose beauty has cheered many 
a man about to die, or back from the clutch 
of death. Pretty, regular features, hair of the 
new French black-red shade, an alluring smile, a 
graceful figure, — that is, Mademoiselle Praince, 
expert actress, particularly of the shrewish wife 
type. She was talking to Mme. Beatrix Dus- 
sand of the Comedie-Frangaise and to Georges 
Marey of the Athenee. It was logical that the 
three should be set apart, for no other actors in 
Paris have given themselves more freely to the 
Theatre aux armees. They had the spirit to 
fight; failing the ability, they acted for those who 
could fight. Georges Marey is an admirable 
actor, beloved of the Parisians for his clever work 
in comedy, a joy to watch. He was mobilized 
and then rejected on the score of health. He is 
handsome, ebon-dark as to hair and eyes, and 
lithe, nervous, stung to the quick with a passion 
for France. When I approached, he was nodding 
approvingly at a remark of Madame Dussand, 
which was : 

" And so I said to him, ' You may be a great 
author, but I will not act in your plays, for you 
are a coward, an embusque. You should be fight- 
ing. I would not act with an actor who was 
an embusque! Why should I have anything 
to do in your plays?' Ah, yes, everyone in the 

327 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

Comedie-Frangaise knows what I think of that 
man!" 

What Madame Dussand thinks would count 
with the members of the Comedie-Francaise, for 
she is one of their best actresses, which means one 
of the best in the whole world. As I saw her on 
the platform there, her splendid dark eyes flash- 
ing, her strong chin cocked at an obstinate angle, 
forceful, full-blooded, her voice a bit tense and 
emphatic, I did not realize how finished, how per- 
fect, how subtle, her acting would be. 

Those three I saw first, against that back- 
ground of poilu blue, magnetic, vivid people, dear 
to the hearts of Parisians, dearer still to thou- 
sands of soldiers before whom they have poured 
themselves as they never have to the Parisians. 
But there were four others : a small, blonde, lus- 
trous woman in brown; a taller dark woman in 
brown and yellow; a dark, thickset, short man, 
dressed like a poilu, and a tall, stout man in black 
who could have passed for an American. Georges 
Marey took me in charge, and made the introduc- 
tions. When he presented the smaller woman, 
Mme. Nina May of the Opera-Comique, she 
responded in good United States of the southern 
brand, and her big blue eyes beamed with frater- 
nal welcome. She is from New Orleans, but is 
married to a Belgian and sings now by prefer- 
ence in Paris. 

The two men hastened to use what English 
they had. The tall one, M. Robert Casa, shows 

328 



BARNSTORMING FOR POILUS 

the world an innocently humorous comedian face 
that can alter in a moment to sly knowingness. 
For long he has been a singer with the Scala 
theatre. When the war broke out he left singing 
and was put in the trenches at Verdun. But his 
heart was weak; he could not run on march, and 
he was sent back to civil life. M. Lucien Boyer 
has every right to his poilu uniform, for at the 
beginning of the war he served in the trenches 
for over a year. For long he has been well known 
in France because of his writing and singing. He 
has the poilu beard, is slightly bald, and has a 
good-humored smile, which is in keeping with his 
comfortable bourgeois figure, from which has long 
since departed a waist line. 

The fourth woman, Mile. Debory, was, like 
myself, going with this particular group for the 
first time. She acts at the Athenee, but her clearer 
title to importance is the pleasure she gives the 
soldiers with her recitations. She is dark, good- 
looking, a bit saurian in type, with a charm that 
convinces men at once and women a little later. 

After our greetings were over Mile. Praince 
took from her " sac " a lip stick of highly unnatu- 
ral purple-red and, with the aid of a jewelled 
mirror, applied it to her lips in a neat cupid's bow. 
It started an epidemic, just as a cough does in a 
theatre. Each of the other women lip-sticked, or 
powdered, or rouged, the soldiers looking on with 
deep interest. I suppose, if beauty is a profession, 
one has a right to carry it on in the open, but 

329 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

surely one appreciates beauty more if it has the 
air of being unconscious. American women 
are said to carry on their facial adornment too 
freely in public, but they are nothing like so 
frank and frequent about it as French women 
are nowadays, nor is their coloring so high and 
startling. 

With various repetitions of " After you, Al- 
phonse," " After you, Gaston," designed to show 
me that they were up on current American litera- 
ture, the performers helped themselves and me 
into the train. It was full of officers going back 
to the front, with a sprinkling of British ambu- 
lance drivers. Everyone who passed our com- 
partment gazed in with passionate absorption, — 
and yet with the effect of great politeness. Mad- 
ame Dussand tried to get the window opened, 
could not, and said, 

" Zutl " 

I believe " zut " is a dreadful word, but it 
thrilled me only about to the extent that " gosh " 
does, though I always supposed, if I ever heard 
that word spoken I should get a " hell " thrill. 

The train started, and we heard in a thin, far- 
away, trailing sound the cheering of the poilus. 
For these men always go forth to die gallantly; 
noblesse oblige is no longer an axiom for the 
well born, but for every fighter in France. We 
read our papers, commented on the news, looked 
out of the windows, powdered and rouged again. 
To save time, I shall cease to mention this opera- 

33o 



BARNSTORMING FOR POILUS 

tion; but figure it to yourself as occurring when 
nothing else does. 

"Praince, my cocotte (another naughty word) ," 
said Madame Dussand, " my boots are longer 
than yours.'' 

" Not," said Mile. Praince. 

They put their feet up on the seats, the men 
making way, and we measured the height of their 
boots, — I doing it with my eyes only. Then all 
of us showed our boots and bragged about them. 
All the time officers were passing, looking in with 
longing eyes. The men went away to smoke; 
Mademoiselle Praince began to practise the " in- 
vocation " she was to say to the soldiers when we 
gave our first programme ; Madame Dussand told 
me something of what I was to see. 

" An actress who has played for the soldiers," 
she said, " burns to go back. When one returns 
to Paris after a first visit to the front one is n't 
the same person, — and one can't endure the 
people who find time long." 

" I should think to play before these soldiers 
from Verdun would be particularly moving," I 
offered. 

Mile. Praince left off rehearsing and said, 

" Ah, Verdun, — there is nothing so moving 
as to play before the soldiers of Verdun, for one 
is playing before the soldiers of all France. I 
have acted almost everywhere at the front, and 
I have carried away unforgettable impressions 
of bravery, of power. But Verdun, — ah, there 

33i 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

I found something mysterious, sacred even. I 
kept my voice lowered, as if I were in a sick cham- 
ber, or a church, and so did everyone else. The 
officers gave us dinner in a great dining-room; 
there were fully four hundred of us, but no one 
raised his voice; there was nothing but a great, 
gentle murmuring. And then to go out in the 
streets, and see the soldiers who had been through 
such horrors; to see them passing by, just rolls of 
mud! You will know more presently, madame, 
of Verdun mud. Ah, — but Verdun — one goes 
away never the same I " 

No one spoke for a moment. There in that 
crowded compartment, in spite of the clamor of 
the creaking train, and the voices of officers in 
the corridor, I felt a sense of silence, of poign- 
ancy, of deep, inexpressible feeling. Then the 
men came in to escort us to second breakfast. By 
this time we were well in the war zone. We 
knew it, not only by the fact that there were no 
women passengers except those of our group ; but 
also because of what flashed by the windows as 
we rushed on to Epernay, — to Chalons-sur- 
Marne, to Bar-le-Duc. 

During the long meal Mile. Praince and Mad- 
ame May and I sat opposite British ambulance 
drivers, and here I got rid of the fallacy about 
the " inimitable French gesture." It is n't inimi- 
table at all. Those Englishmen imitated it ad- 
mirably, and since then I 've observed scores of 
American ambulance drivers and aviators shrug- 

332 



BARNSTORMING FOR POILUS 

ging and grimacing just as charmingly as the 
French do. By the time I had verified this dis- 
covery we were at Bar-le-Duc. Out we got, to 
be met by the lieutenant without whom thereafter 
we were not permitted to move, and to be put in 
military motors and driven to the chief hotel. 

Water did not seem scarce at Bar-le-Duc, espe- 
cially in view of the rain, but I have never seen 
such a dirty hotel as that one. Every morning 
water was sprinkled on the grimy floors, and little 
blobs of mud arose, protestingly. I imagine if 
anyone had tried to scrub the floors the top layer 
of dirt would have yelled agonizedly, and begged 
not to be separated from its lower layers, the 
companions of a generation ! When I got to my 
room I stripped down the bed and examined the 
sheets. I could see the print of two other people. 
This is war time, and we ought to be democratic, 
but there are limits. I slept on a nice clean 
kimona. I afterwards found that the other 
women had done the same. When we complained 
to the men, they said, " Dirt? What dirt? " and 
began to talk about the excellent food, which 
shows what men are ! But the food was excellent. 

The plan was to go in motors each morning to 
our objective, wherever it might be, returning 
each night to sleep in Bar-le-Duc. We were to 
go first to a little village called Erize-St.-Dizier, 
not very far from St. Mihiel. We set out under 
the pouring rain, Madame May, M. Casa and 
I going together. 

333 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

" I can tell by the look of that chauffeur," said 
M. Casa, " that he will have no respect for our 
backbones. Look out for jars." 

It was a correct diagnosis; moreover, during the 
next few days the driver lost his way several 
times, to our sincere satisfaction. He took us off 
at a smart pace, and Madame May hummed a bar 
of the Marseillaise, with which she was going to 
end the programme. 

"What is this entertainment like?" I asked. 
" Do you sing other patriotic songs? Are the 
plays patriotic? " 

"Oh, no!" she said. "At first, when the 
theatre was organized, we used to have such plays 
and songs, but it made the soldiers nervous. They 
don't want plays about heroes." 

" I Ve heard them talk about that," said M. 
Casa. " Their life is so different from ours that 
we can't interpret it. They don't like it if you say 
' Forward ' or * We '11 get them,' — like that 
poster, you know, ' Ou les aura! ' Why should 
they? For we 're only civilians. They have their 
officers for that. We don't know what we 're 
talking of when we use big phrases about war to 
them. No wonder we set their teeth on edge. I 
know, for I was in the trenches once." 

" They don't want to be instructed, either," 
Madame May added; "they just want to laugh. 
So we give them all sorts of comedies and farces, 
and funny recitations, and songs of the road. 
They like to hear about Paris, for they want to 

534 



BARNSTORMING FOR POILUS 

know if our skirts are really to our knees, as 
people say, and if we walk with canes. Oh, look 
at those strange little men." 

They were Annamites, repairing the road. 
Our route led us over undulating country. Some- 
times we were on a hill and could look down and 
see a valley with a little stream running through it, 
and an abnormally high poplar far off on a 
plateau; we would pass a bare slope, a huddle of 
houses; then little villages, from which half the 
inhabitants had gone; little knots of trees. We 
passed trenches and barbed-wire entanglements, 
and, just a little further on, we saw a young 
woman ploughing and an old man forking hay out 
of a loft. Twilight was promising when we drew 
up at a farmhouse. We stepped out and Madame 
May shrieked. The Verdun mud ! We had only 
a few steps to go, but we were well splashed and 
laden when we reached the doorsill. 

We passed through a kitchen with a wide 
hearth, beside which a smiling, white-capped old 
woman stood, and entered a sitting-room full of 
officers. Headquarters, evidently, and the offi- 
cers had tea for us. Charming men, some of them 
rather nervous, I thought, but that was little to 
wonder at in view of their seven awful days in 
the Verdun attack. Rarely have women been wel- 
comed as we were. I heard one officer say he 
had n't heard the swish of a silk petticoat for 
months. 

The officers inquired about our journey, and 
335 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

asked where we were going after Erize-St.-Dizier. 
The women replied that God knew, and described 
the horrors of the dirt in the hotel at Bar-le-Duc. 
I judged our sympathetic auditors must have 
known something about dirt. 

Tea over, we got into the motors, and, looking 
back, we could make out the figures of the officers 
hurrying after us on foot, each carrying a chair. 
We drove to a huge barn that must have measured 
forty by a hundred feet. No poilu stood outside ; 
they were all within, making sure of standing 
room, but eager, welcoming faces beamed at us 
out of the doorway. 

And inside, — a silent blue shadow, the 
crowded silhouettes of the standing poilus; the 
dim, white, smiling faces ; their eager silence. We 
felt their greeting, their interest, the moment we 
entered. That silence spoke deeply; those patient, 
brave, standing men, who had been through such 
horror, and who were waiting so gratefully for 
the people who were going to bring them a little 
gaiety ! 

" Ah, madame," said M. Boyer at my elbow, 
" do not drive the tears back. They are worthy 
of it, these soldiers of France. In our hearts all 
we artists weep whenever we play for them." 

We stumbled across a muddy earthen floor to 
the back of the building. We did not realize till 
later how the soldiers had worked to make the 
place ready for us, taking out the fodder and 
sweeping up, as well as they could. At the back 

336 



BARNSTORMING FOR POILUS 

they had erected a little stage, on which stood a 
table and a chair or two, The footlights were 
furnished by four acetylene lamps, fed by a pipe 
running from the cans ; they had fashioned burlap 
curtains, which two of them stood ready to draw. 
They had even curtained off a little space at one 
side of the stage where the actors might dress 
and make up. As we crossed the muddy floor a 
little string orchestra of poilus began to play. 
While the performers went behind the dressing 
curtain I stayed and applauded the musicians. At 
the end of their piece, when I told them how good 
their work was, the leader said. 

" Ah, madame should have heard us before the 
attack at Verdun. We had some members then, 
but half of us were lost in that first half hour." 

When the band began to play again and the 
officers entered, carrying the orchestra seats, I 
went behind the curtains. Madame Dussand was 
backed against the wall, her lips moving, her beau- 
tiful eyes rather glazed. 

" If I didn't know better," I began, " I should 
think — " 

" Ah, but I am nervous," she said. " It 's not 
the ordinary trac, but something deeper, some- 
thing nearer my heart. I have played before the 
most illustrious and the most difficult auditors, but 
I did not feel them as I do now. I want to give 
these men the best I have. I want to be more 
vibrating, more vital for these unknown children 
of faraway provinces than I have ever cared to 

337 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

be before royal boxes. Do you know, madame, 
that the greatest artists in France, or the most in- 
different, tremble like novices before these sol- 
diers, though they are always so responsive, so 
devoted, — " 

Her voice broke. 

" It 's true," Georges Marey said, his fine face 
lighting. " Nobody knows how great, how beau- 
tiful these men are ! They have done everything, 
they are everything. They have saved France." 

Outside there was a slight movement among the 
soldiers. The musicians stopped playing. Two 
poilus drew aside the curtain, and there stood 
Mile. Praince, in her pink silk jacket and mud- 
splashed skirt and boots, ready to say the invo- 
cation to the soldiers. It had been written by 
someone else, but the words came as if from her 
heart, telling the love, the reverence, the grati- 
tude, the actors felt for the soldiers. Then fol- 
lowed three full hours of entertainment. No 
other audiences can equal the soldiers for breath- 
less attention and appreciation. They were stand- 
ing, — except for a few who had perched on a 
small loft, and upon cross beams. They were 
absolutely still, except for their laughter or clap- 
ping, and that they hushed quickly, that no word 
should be lost. There was a little shouting, but 
not much, not at all of the American sort; it was, 
so to speak, polite, diffident, almost wistful. Once 
they showed a quick, keen curiosity. It was when 
the sound of the enemy's guns could be heard. 

338 



BARNSTORMING FOR POILUS 

They wanted to see how these artists were taking 
the dangers of the front. 

They liked everything they heard : the beautiful 
singing of Madame May, the humorous recitations 
of Mile. Debory. They laughed at the songs of 
M. Casa, who played his own accompaniments, 
facing the audience with wide-open, innocent eyes 
and puckered mouth, and the look of a serene, 
old fat mother of a family, his head far back, his 
chin nestling. Then of a sudden a sly sophisti- 
cated look would come into his eyes at some line, 
and he would relax into an oily fat smile. They 
liked M. Boyer, who strode on the platform in 
his gray-blue overcoat, smiling, zestful, abundant, 
sometimes laughing in the middle of his songs. 
He was as much a joy to them as M. Casa. Par- 
ticularly they loved the three little comedies, two- 
part, three-part, and four-part, clever, brilliant, 
subtle, — and all the points " got over." There 
was so much highly-charged feeling, such an elec- 
tric atmosphere, such direct contact of mind with 
mind that it was impossible that the points should 
not get over. At the close of the last play, in 
which Madame Dussand, Mile. Praince, Georges 
Marey, and M. Casa acted, somebody called out 
" one, two, three," and then the soldiers clapped 
in a series of " one-two-three-f our-five ; pause; 
one-two-three-four-five ; pause ; one-two-three- 
four-five; pause; one-two-three." 

But there were two occasions when the audience 
and the actors were nearly one. The first time 

339 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

was when Madame Dussand sang the songs of 
the road to them, and got them to join in the cho- 
ruses. For generations those songs have been in 
the blood and bones of the French people: Fan- 
fan la Tulipe; Aupres de ma Blonde; Colette 
un Jour, and En Passant par la Lorraine. At 
first the soldiers were shy, but presently they 
were unable to resist Madame Dussand's verve, 
her way of acting out the lines, hands on hips, 
head swinging, her spirited gestures that drew 
the audience in towards her. The other mo- 
ment of reunion was at the end when Madame 
May sang the Marseillaise. She sang with pene- 
trating sweetness and passion, and they joined in, 
taking off their helmets or caps. They did not 
sing, these soldiers, with the wild enthusiasm of 
the civilian in Paris, but quietly, almost solemnly. 
They know, better than the civilians, what their 
ideal of patriotism is costing them. 

A wonderful three hours. But it was impossible 
to look at those men without a tightness in the 
throat. Not so much because they had just come 
back from horror and death; not because they 
would soon again face these foes of all peace, all 
happiness. But because from those faces all the 
youth was seared away. One soldier of perhaps 
eighteen, a boy with a color like a Canadian, for 
three hours had his face fixed like a mask of joy- 
ous expectation. His eyebrows were raised; the 
corners of his mouth were turned up, and the tip 
of his tongue was fixed against his teeth. Yet at 

340 



BARNSTORMING FOR POILUS 

the end, when his face relaxed, there showed a 
substructure of strain. All of them had it, some 
more than others. There was a young sub-lieu- 
tenant whose face haunted me, a boy with a thin, 
strong, sensitive profile. His eyes were as old as 
a sybil's; his smile, however spontaneous, was 
weary. I thought of the pain it must give the 
woman who loved him most to see that worn, 
strained face, symbol of his soul. All the soldiers 
smiled, but the smile was on top. Their subcon- 
scious selves never forget the anguish of war, 
never go off duty. 

The performance was over. The soldiers lin- 
gered in the barn or just outside to see us go 
away. We spoke to them, and they thanked us. 

" You don't know how happy you have made 
us," they said, again and again; "come back 
soon." 

M. Casa and M. Marey passed through the 
groups, bowing only, and got into their respective 
motors. 

"Why didn't you talk to the soldiers?" I 
asked M. Casa. 

" It 's not wise. They 're suspicious of any 
man not in uniform, even if he is unfit. Me, — 
for example. I look well ; how do they know I am 
ill? Why am I not fighting for my country in- 
stead of singing? How do they know I am not 
an embus que? " 

The motors again and the officers' headquar- 
ters for dinner; seven courses, and a typewritten 

34i 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

menu, and soldier servants to wait on us, and a 
sense of the most delighted welcome. The poilus 
in their white coats beamed at us affectionately 
as they served us in the dim old room. The offi- 
cers paid us compliments, and begged us not to 
go home till morning, — nor did we. Very inter- 
esting it was to watch the faces of the officers. 
I fancied I could tell the staff officers from those 
who were in actual fighting, for the faces of the 
latter had the same substructure of strain as those 
of the poilus. 

What interested me most in the table talk, after 
I got used to the kind of stories that were going 
the round (though I pretended that my French 
was too poor to translate them), was the way the 
influence of that attack at Verdun came seeping 
forth, enveloping one slowly like some miasma, 
not to be driven away. From every quarter of 
the long table I could hear that talk of Verdun. 

" The attack was to be at ten," said the colonel; 
" from eight to ten, — I have never known the 
time to drag as on that day. I kept doubting the 
truth of my honest little watch." 

" Almost fifty thousand men engaged, four 
divisions." 

"... rifle-shooting; none, whatever. That 
battle was fought with the artillery and with 
bombs. A rifle was of no more use than a stirring 
spoon." 

" Mud. It was quicksand mud. It buried 
the Germans. It buried our own men. A 

342 



BARNSTORMING FOR POILUS 

glorious victory, — but what a strange weapon, 
that mud." 

" Those magnificent Colonials. The big black 
leaping Senegalese going first, — they terrify the 
Germans. Then the Arabs, the Moroccans, Tu- 
nisians. I command a company of Arabs; brave 
men, good fighters, but one never knows when 
they are going to go mad with panic. They are 
like the Senegalese; they can't stand a bombard- 
ment; so we bring them down to the trenches just 
the night before the attack." 

" Germans glad to be taken. We did n't even 
send them under guard to Verdun. They sur- 
rendered; we faced them towards the fortress, 
gave them a push, and said, ' Go there ! ' and they 
went, grinning, relieved." 

" Ah, no, why should I disbelieve it when a 
man tells me that he will never come, alive, out of 
this battle! I try to comfort him, to laugh at 
him, but in four cases out of five, he is right. 
Something tells him, and he is right to listen, and 
to write his last letters home. Two such men 
who said that to me before the attack were 
smothered in the mud." 

" No, madame (this to me), we had relatively 
few losses. We took twelve thousand prisoners, 
as you know; relatively few losses." 

I don't like that word " relatively " when it 
applies to the death of men in battle. If the stand- 
ard of measurement is a few rods of ground, ten 
kilometres by three to three and a half, — well, 

343 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

then, as usual, one gives up the whole horrible 
business. As the hours passed, and the wine in 
the decanters grew lower, one or two officers be- 
came franker. I heard of a quarter lost from this 
company, a fifth from that; of the terrible slaugh- 
ter of the first half hour; of stretcher-bearers 
killed at their work; of hundreds of men with 
frozen feet — and always, of the terrible sucking 
murder done by the mud. It drank men in, took 
them one by one, when there was no help near, 
and absorbed them, relentlessly, as they struggled. 
I began to feel as I had on other occasions that 
the mud was some devil, mocking men, making 
Nature herself side against them. The word 
" mud " has a sinister connotation for me now 
that I can never shake off. 

The car, then, and a long drive home through 
the mud. Beside me, M. Casa began a humorous 
monologue. For mile after mile it went on, bril- 
liant or ridiculous or shocking. 

" But, monsieur," I said, " you are beginning to 
make me believe that it is not true that humorists 
are really serious persons." 

" Listen, madame," he said, " I had a brother 
who was dearer to me than anyone in the world. 
That brother, he loved his wife and child, and 
he made a good living for them. He had no frivo- 
lous interests outside his home, his business and 
his friends. And now, he 's dead in the war; he 's 
nothing. So I, madame, I laugh; in the light of 
the war, there is nothing worth worrying about, 
worth shedding a tear over, nothing, nothing." 

344 



BARNSTORMING FOR POILUS 

M. Casa hummed a little tune, and added, 

" And now I '11 look out of the window, and see 
if there is any sign of my white-faced friend, the 
moon." 

Our second breakfast next morning in the hotel 
was typical of the brilliant hours we spent to- 
gether, before and after performances. As each 
actor came downstairs he went the rounds of the 
table, kissing the actresses on both cheeks, and 
shaking hands with the men. We sat at table 
something like two hours. The actors told inci- 
dents that had happened to them while playing 
before the soldiers on previous occasions. Mile. 
Praince said that once she acted with a gun car- 
riage for the stage, and had to make her exit via 
the arms of the soldiers. Madame May told a 
story of playing in Alsace, at Thann, when an old, 
old man, much moved, said, 

" Since you are so good as to come so far to 
play for us, I '11 show you a flag. It is the old 
flag from the townhall of Strasburg, which I my- 
self raised in 1870, and which I 've kept hidden 
from the Germans ever since." 

Madame Dussand told of having been at Pogny 
when a German prisoner was brought in to the 
commanding officer. The man wept, and got 
down on his knees, begging for mercy. Just then 
a French soldier was brought in, badly wounded. 

" What is it you want, my child? " the officer 
asked him. 

" Oh, my colonel, I am come to tell you good- 
345 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

bye," he replied. Then, seeing the German on 
his knees, he looked at him ferociously, and added : 
" You, you 're crying, you coward. I am dead, 
but I 'm not crying! " 

They began to talk then of the spirit of the sol- 
dier, M. Boyer saying that he liked to perform 
before the soldiers just after they had come from 
the front, because then they were excited and 
responsive. 

" Ah," he added, " you talk of soldiers. You 
should have seen those with whom I fought, in 
the first year of the war. When I remember their 
faces during mass before we went into an attack ! 
I sang then as I never do now. Those men! 
Flow marvellous they were ! All dead now ! 
They did not have much experience, but what a 
spirit! The ones fighting now have experience, 
— but if only we could have those first soldiers 
back, there would n't be a German alive in fifteen 
years ! 

" Ah, to hear those first soldiers singing the 
Marseillaise! " cried M. Marey. " It should 
always be a man who sings the Marseillaise" 

From talk of the soldiers they would perhaps 
swing into a series of stories not at all fit for a 
young girl to hear, and then into a discussion of 
art. 

" An actor without gesture," Madame Dus- 
sand would exclaim, " is nothing." 

A knot of eager voices would begin to illustrate 
that point, analyzing the work of this and that 

346 



BARNSTORMING FOR POILUS 

actor. Then M. Casa would solemnly arise, wind 
his napkin into a muff, and, gliding across an imag- 
inary stage, would show us how Madame Dussand 
took her applause in the Comedie-Frangaise. Or, 
speaking into a corner of the sideboard, he would 
show how another great actor made a speech of 
thanks on the part of his associates. After that 
he gave an impersonation of all of us as we had 
acted when he had been introduced to us, the 
group shouting out delightedly the name of each 
person caricatured. Then perhaps we would run 
over the group of officers we had met the day 
before, telling which ones we had liked best. 
Then there would be more stories, — possibly 
personal in character. 

" My little boy is a child in a thousand," one of 
the men said. " Let me illustrate. Just a few 
weeks ago my wife and I had a misunderstanding. 
You perceive? Very well. I packed up my things 
and moved away. A few days later I had a note 
from my little boy, who is at school. ' Dear 
Papa,' he wrote. ' I am very sorry to hear of 
the difficulty you and mamma have had. It is very 
foolish, this. I have asked for a holiday for next 
Sunday, and I am coming home from school. I 
shall expect to see you and mamma both in the 
house, very happy to see me, and very happy to 
be reconciled.' He wrote the same letter to his 
mother. Naturally, we were together on Sunday, 
as he had directed." 

Charming, brilliant, kindly, lovable people ! 
347 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

The time we spent at the table went so fast that I 
was always surprised when the officer in charge 
told us that the cars were at the door to take us 
to our soldiers. We gave them a performance 
every day, — and every time we gained fresh im- 
pressions; always the actors had the devoted at- 
tention of the poilus ; always they looked tired to 
the bone of their souls; always we got the sinister 
atmosphere of the battle of Verdun. 

Once we were at Ligny, rather a large town, 
to play before an audience that had been brought 
in from villages round about; the various com- 
panies did not know each other, and their own 
officers were not with them. That audience did 
not fuse well. There were difficulties even before 
the performance, for the actors were indignant 
at the caretaker of the hall in which they played 

— a cross old woman who complained because the 
soldiers were tracking in mud. We sat in her own 
sitting-room on her own chairs, and told her what 
we thought of her. One person even remarked 

— sotto voce, however — that she deserved the 
beard and moustache God had afflicted her with. 

" Track mud over your floors," said Madame 
May, usually so gentle; "they could track over 
my heart if they wanted to." 

Then, some of the soldiers did not get the 
points; the audience were mostly Colonials, and 
the negroes, at least, did not have the alertness of 
the poilus. Others seemed oversophisticated. 
The actors felt it; those who were lesser artists 

348 



BARNSTORMING FOR POILUS 

exaggerated their effects; overdid it; the greater 
tried by their art to make the audience one. 

Twice more we played in rooms, — one was a 
little schoolroom in a village big enough to have 
a mayor. He sat in the centre of the audience, a 
shrewd-faced provincial, not quite sure how far he 
ought to countenance Paris actresses. On the 
front seat sat General de Voillemont, a magnifi- 
cent-looking man with a crepe band on his sleeve. 
At his feet crouched a dog that has been with 
him everywhere in the field. The general told me 
he had had four sons fighting for France; one had 
been wounded in the Verdun attack, and it had 
been three days before the father had got word 
of how he was. 

He enjoyed the performance as much as any of 
the poilus; and as M. Boyer sang his songs the 
general very audibly joined in; he seemed to know 
them all. The poilus kept their eyes on him as 
much as they did on the actresses. It was plain 
to see that they adored him. When the Marseil- 
laise had been sung the general sprang to his feet. 

" Ladies and gentlemen," he said, " I thank you 
on behalf of my soldiers and myself, for your won- 
derful programme, which has touched our hearts 
and helped our minds, weary after the recent 
battle. You have played, no doubt, before many 
famous audiences, but never yet to an audience 
like this, never before have you played to heroes, 
— to heroes such as my men are, to the noblest, 
the bravest soldiers France has ever known," 

349 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

The look in the eyes of the general's dog was 
no more devoted than the look in the eyes of the 
men. Indeed, we all fell in love with him, but he 
singled out Mile. Debory for a special honor, 
making her a corporal in the Fifty-fifth Regiment, 
giving her epaulets with the numbers on. That 
decoration did not seem quite sufficient to Mile. 
Debory, who smiled, blushed, and leaned ever so 
definitely towards him. So then the general kissed 
her on both cheeks. 

It was after another performance in a hall in 
Ligny when we were having tea with the officers 
that I saw the artists out of character; that is, 
most of them were as prim as children trying to 
be good in church. I was having a beautiful time 
with the Count of Paris, whose family is as old as 
all France, but who looks like an Irishman, and 
is said to be absolutely impervious under fire. 
But Madame May moaned in my ear, in English, 

" Oh, how stiff they are, how difficult ! I want 
to go home. Nobody is having a good time but 
you and Marcelle Praince." 

Mile. Praince was talking to a handsome offi- 
cer, — unusually tall for a Frenchman. But then 
one is constantly surprised by the number of tall 
officers one sees in the war zone. I was arrested 
by her air. She is very self-confident, very secure 
in her sense of art. As I watched her I decided 
that the only difference between her and a society 
leader is that her surface is not quite so suave, 
and her manners to men rather less trusting, 

35o 



BARNSTORMING FOR POILUS 

rather more self-protecting. As she talked to 
her enthralled officer, she wore a courageous 
armor of indifference; she did not look at him 
very much, but when she did her glance was direct. 
She smiled, she was charming, but she gave the 
impression of being only slightly aware of him. 
Not a subtle, but a very practical person. 

Madame Dussand was practising her stage 
laugh, not the loud, joyous yawp with which she 
had been wont to welcome the witticisms at break- 
fast. Her generous lovable spirit was under a 
cloud. Watching her, I felt glad when the little 
officer under whose care we were put us into our 
motors, and took us to the next place at which we 
were to play. 

There our spirits rose. For one thing, most 
of the officers with whom we had dined on our 
first barnstorming evening had motored over to 
be with us. Then, we were to play again in a barn, 
and as we approached it, we saw the poilus hurry- 
ing towards it, — our own blessed men in blue. 
Best of all our dressing-room was to be a kitchen 
from which a passage led directly into the barn. 
And such a kitchen ! It stood not many miles from 
Domremy in Lorraine, where Joan of Arc was 
born, and I understand the two places are rather 
alike. The room itself is a little, dark, raftered 
place, containing an old dresser, and a bench, a 
chair or two, and, most important of all, a high 
chimney. This chimney, and the old woman who 
sat by it, were worth all the miles of sea and land 

35i 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

I had crossed. The chimney was about sixteen 
feet broad by seven deep ; and thirty or forty feet 
high. As I peered up, through its very black, 
smoke-incrusted walls, the distance seemed illimi- 
table, the faint bit of sky at the top, a whole world 
away. Hooks stood out from the sooty walls 
for smoking hams, and a long crane hung over the 
fire beneath. That chimney was made four hun- 
dred years ago, when wood was plentiful and fires 
were generous, and when a whole ox could be 
roasted at once, if need be. It was built before 
Joan of Arc was born. Well, doubtless, it was 
obvious enough to dream over the thousands of 
men that had died for France while that black old 
hearth and chimney had stood there; obvious, 
but very real, because in the stable next door were 
hundreds of men in blue who were also going to 
die for France. 

The old woman was a little bent creature with 
a face like a rosy November apple, blue eyes, and 
a young girl's smile. She wore a white cap with 
strings. As the actresses came in she swept a 
heap of clothes from off the long bench before 
the fire, and urged us to sit down. And as we sat 
there, scraping the mud off our boots, she said, 

" You come to sing for the soldiers? " 

" Yes, madame." 

" I," said the old woman, " I wash for the sol- 
diers," and she patted the heap of clothes that 
she held in her arms. 

A very simple little happening, that, but there 
352 



BARNSTORMING FOR POILUS 

was something about it that made our eyes grow 
dim. She was seventy years old, and she had 
eight sons fighting for France. She had been 
born in that house, had brought up her sons there, 
and now, in spite of the danger of shells, she 
would not move away. 

" I cannot wash for my eight boys," she said, 
" but there are other soldiers here. I wash for 
them. When things happen here that make them 
laugh, I laugh too, and when they dream, as you 
will make them dream to-night, mesdames, then 
I smile too." 

Madame May, wiping her eyes, whispered 
to me, 

" She 's a good deal of a contrast to that care- 
taker at Ligny, — or to the last landlady I met 
in the war zone who accused us of coming to get 
what men were left to lead to destruction. She 
seemed to prefer Germans to us." 

Then the stables : the same impression of blue 
shadow; the silhouettes of the crowded, standing 
soldiers; the eager welcoming faces, with their 
substructure of strain. In front of the soldiers 
was a row of chairs on which sat officers, and the 
mayor of the village, an old white-haired man of 
ninety-two, with a patriarchal beard and a keen 
eye. He sat with his arms folded, for the sake 
of politeness, and he had the air of a father who 
has led his deserving children out to give them a 
treat. These officers, among them our old fol- 
lowers, were in gay spirits. When Madame May 

353 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

sang Tipperary they all joined in the chorus, 
pronouncing the title-word " Tipperawry." With 
them was an officer whose mother was an 
American. 

Talking to him between acts, and looking at 
the faces of the soldiers, I again felt the sinister 
atmosphere of Verdun. 

'" One of your officers/' I said, " told me that 
the soldiers are happy. I should n't call them 
that by their faces, — not even here, where they 
are * en repos.' " 

"Here," he replied, "they are not fighting; 
they are away from home, and wondering if they 
are going to get permissions to go, or thinking of 
the permissions they have lost, or have yet to 
come. Perhaps some of them here had bad news 
from home, or none at all. It 's a whole world 
here, — an abnormal world. No, they 're not 
happy. They 're brave, — and maybe cynical." 

"Oh, not that!" 

" Then perhaps I am. Three villages taken in 
the last attack at Verdun; some earthworks; one 
hundred and fifty guns accounted for; twelve thou- 
sand prisoners, and as many more killed. But, — 
was it worth while? I have a horror of that 
attack. So many young boys were in it who were 
in the trenches for the first time. The men suf- 
fered so dreadfully. No one will ever know how 
much ! If you had seen them coming back, as I 
did, you would have thought that they had been 
defeated instead of victorious. Luckily our men 

354 



BARNSTORMING FOR POILUS 

have been through so much that a lot of them 
don't feel any more." 

He looked as if he felt keenly enough, and pres- 
ently he began to talk about himself. 

" At the beginning of the war I found the diary 
of a dead German. He wrote with the greatest 
of enthusiasm; he said that he was assisting in the 
greatest tragedy of the world. We all felt that 
way at first. But now there 's no more enthusi- 
asm. Men feel that they must keep up the honor 
of the regiment, and must die for France if it 's 
necessary. But the glory is gone. What we do, 
we do from habit. Maybe we '11. idealize it all 
afterwards, but we don't now. 

"And the monotony! It's not good for the 
men. They 're better fed than they were, and 
they are well disciplined, in that they fight when 
they are bidden. But they don't have work to do 
in the sense of their old trades ; they lack the influ- 
ence of their wives and children. Some men will 
come out of this better, and some worse, but no 
one will remain the same. I '11 come out worse. 
I 'm twenty-seven, and I 've got no more impulses, 
no ideas, no wants. That's the abnormal part 
of it; I 've no wants. I '11 be so old when the war 
is over that I won't be able to develop any. Be- 
fore the war I used to write verses; read good 
things ; study. Now I 've got so much time on 
my hands that I could become very learned. But 
I don't read. I play cards, and get more callous 
every day I live ! " 

355 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

M. Boyer had come on the stage, and the 
poilus were responding to his familiar smile. He 
recited a piece about what it would be like the 
day the French army marched under the Arc de 
Triomphe, with the civilians whom they had saved 
crowding about them. He spoke of the applause 
given to the aviators and marines, the grenadiers, 
dragoons, and artillerymen. Then the infantry- 
men passed. There was a dead silence. They 
looked about to see why they were not applauded. 
The civilians were on their knees. • 

There were tears in the eyes of many of the sol- 
diers ; they moved a little, and coughed. 

" There! " I said, triumphantly, to the Franco- 
American; " You see! They're not cynical! 
They know that what they 're doing is worth while 
and that the civilians understand, are grateful." 

He might have replied, but at that moment 
Madame May came on the stage, leading a young 
poilu. There was a pleasant stir among the audi- 
ence. One of their own comrades was going to 
help the artists. The soldier was an opera singer 
from the provinces. He had a beautiful tenor 
voice, and he and Madame May sang several selec- 
tions from Manon, her favorite role. At first the 
poilu was shy of approaching her in the love parts, 
but presently he forgot everything but the music. 
It was a joy to see the pride on the faces of the 
soldiers. When Madame May was made a cor- 
poral of the Fifty-fifth Regiment, and the tenor 
pinned the epaulets upon her coat, they trans- 

356 



BARNSTORMING FOR POILUS 

ferred their pride to her, accepting her as their 
comrade. At the close of the programme the 
tenor sang the Marseillaise. He stood leaning 
a trifle backward, his head high, his right arm held 
up; at " Marchons" he stepped forward a pace. 
I felt as if he were holding a flag. The soldiers 
sang the second verse. I shall never again hear 
the Marseillaise sung as it was that night. 

Dinner then; a delicious meal, with soldier serv- 
ants waiting on us, the young tenor asked in to 
have wine with us. Stories, recitations by Mile. 
Debory of M. Boyer's work; toasts; talk; then, in 
the early hours of the morning the cars. Good- 
bye to the old kitchen, to the little old woman 
long at rest, to the men in blue, sleeping in the 
barn. Asleep, but still we were carrying them 
with us. They had given the actors so much more 
than the actors had given them. We are told that 
to view tragedy is purifying to the soul. Perhaps 
never till now could comedy be called purifying. 
But it was, — not because of the comedy, but 
because of those brave common heroes of France 
for whom it was made. It has been said that it is 
good for the morale of the soldiers to see these 
performances of the army theatre; it is equally 
good for the actors who return to Paris serene, 
comforted, sure of the future of France. 

Mud still as we got into our cars, but the rain 
gone and a wonderful keen moon in a light blue 
sky. As we slipped over the white road, the witch- 
ery of the moon was such that I could not believe 

357 



THE WHITE FLAME OF FRANCE 

we were passing through stretches of country that 
had known death and desolation. The untilled 
fields lay dark and restful. The little cottages 
seemed to drowse without danger under the over- 
hanging trees. I lost sight of the shelled houses 
and barbed-wire entanglements and deserted 
trenches. I saw only the homes and fields of a 
peaceful people, and at every crossroads a tall 
stone wayside cross. On each one the hanging 
Christ stood out sharply in the moonlight, waiting 
for the day of peace and forgiveness. 



358 



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